Mentalization within close relationships: The role of specific attachment style

Abstract

Mentalization is a form of social cognition that enables to perceive and interpret human behaviour in terms of intentional mental states (Frith & Frith, 2003) and is influenced by social context (e.g., O'Connor and Hirsch, 1999). Hence, we examined mentalization related to specific attachment relationships (Bowlby, 1969; Fraley, 2007). This study involved 115 participants (85% female) who reported their relationship-specific (ECR-RS; Fraley et al., 2011) and global attachment styles (ECR; Brennan, Clark, Shaver, 1998), and perspective-taking tendency towards their attachment figures (IRI-PT subscale; Davis, 1983). Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task-Revised (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001) was used as a proxy for mentalization disregarding relationships. The results showed that perspective-taking was associated with relationship-specific attachment avoidance (rs > -.29; all ps < .01) whereas global characteristics of mentalization were not related to attachment quality. Our findings indicate that the link between attachment quality and mentalization is relationship-specific.