Maternal mind-mindedness: A latent profile analysis approach

Mind-mindedness refers to parents' or caregivers' ability to view their child as an independent person with individual thoughts and intentional behaviors. Representational mind-mindedness assessment focuses on the caregiver representations of their child's mental states, (e.g., emotions, preferences, and goals). Individual differences in mind-mindedness have been associated with parental caregiving and child outcomes. However, there is a lack of research examining dynamic clusters of mind-related parental representations and their associations with demographic and psychological risk factors. Here, we conducted three sets of latent profile analyses (LPAs) to examine mind-mindedness profiles (Aim 1) and whether mothers belonging to the different classes could be distinguished by their demographic and psychological risk characteristics (Aim 2) in a sample of 181 mothers with infants (M=32.95 years, SD=4.66). Results indicated unique profiles for all three LPA models: 1) when examining mental-attribution profiles between different probes about the present and future infant, three profiles emerged representing high, medium, and low mind-mindedness; 2) when examining relative mind-related attributions versus the non-mental categories, two classes emerged, differing in physical and self-referential attributes; and 3) when examining representational valence, three profiles representing different dominant valence (high in either positive, neutral, or negative attributions) emerged. Associations with demographic factors were identified for each class. This work supports the utilization of LPA for identifying clusters of mind-related representations and demographic differences across groups for the first time. Future work should continue to assess mind-mindedness profiles as they relate to parent factors to disentangle the components of mind-mindedness which are most influential.