The influence of infant temperament on parental mental state talk: a Singaporean context

Abstract

While there is empirical support for the influence of children’s early exposure to mental state discussions on their socioemotional development, studies on the predictors of parental mental state talk remain scarce. To address this gap, we investigated the relationship between children's characteristics, namely age and temperament, and parental mental state talk. The interactions between 85 Singaporean parents and their 5-8 months old infants were examined. Each parent-child dyad participated in a series of tasks, including a free-play and book-reading task. Parents also reported infant’s negative affectivity and orienting/regulating capacity. Parental speech were then transcribed and coded for the subcategories of mental state talk, non-mental state talk, referent, and content. Functions of emotion talk, a sub-category of mental state talk, were also coded. The main analyses revealed no significant relations between parental mental state talk and infant’s age and temperament. Nonetheless, parents engaged in more desire talk than other categories and more references to their child across both tasks. As expected, parents made more book-related comments during the book-reading task, and more non-book-related comments during the free-play. Exploratory analyses detected significant negative associations for infant’s negative affectivity with parental physical state talk, self-references, and guiding as a function of emotion talk. Additionally, a significant negative correlation was found between children’s age and parental ‘think and know’ talk. Results and directions for future studies on parental mental state discussions with infants were discussed.