Fact or fiction? A longitudinal study of play and the development of reflective functioning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Fonagy and Target's (1996, 2000) developmental model of mentalization, play is theorized as a precursor of later mentalization and reflective function (RF); however, the relationship between play and later mentalization and RF has yet to be empirically tested. These processes are particularly important in the context of trauma, but an empirical model of the relationships among mentalization, play, and trauma is currently lacking. The aim of this longitudinal study was to examine whether children's capacity to engage in pretend play, to symbolize, and to make play narratives was associated with later RF in those children. Thirty-nine sexually abused children and 21 nonabused children (aged 3 to 8) participated in the study. The Children's Play Therapy Instrument was used to assess children's free play. Three years after the play assessment, children's RF was assessed using the Child Attachment Interview, coded with the Child and Adolescent Reflective Functioning Scale. Pretend play completion was associated with later other-understanding. Play was also found to mediate the relationship between sexual abuse and children's later mentalization regarding others. These findings are consistent with Fonagy and Target's emphasis on the role of pretend play in the development of a nuanced sense of the qualities of the mind and reality. In sum, the findings lend support to Fonagy and Target's account of playing with reality, and the development of mentalization suggests that it may be more than "fiction." Furthermore, these results suggest that children's ability to create meaningful and coherent play sequences after sexual abuse is associated with the development of a better understanding of their relationships with others. Clinical implications and future directions are discussed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".