Testing Children’s Mentalizing in Middle Childhood: Adopting the Child and Adolescent Reflective Functioning Scale with Clinical and Community Children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Beginning with Ensink’s seminal study (2015), the field entered a new era in which we were able to measure mentalizing in school-aged children. The goal of this work is to continue developing the state of the research within this tradition by exploring the psychometric properties of the Child Reflective Functioning Scale (CRFS) - a measure applied to the Child Attachment Interview and designed to assess RF during middle childhood - within both clinical and normative groups, and to examine if it differentiates between both groups. Participants were 159 Italian children (age range 8–12 years, Mage = 10.66, SD =1.83; 57% males) divided into two groups: 71 children with emotional-behavioral problems (‘clinical group’) and 88 children without emotional-behavioral problems (‘community group’). Demographic data and Verbal Comprehension Index were collected. A two-factor model of CRFS (self- and other-focused RF) was confirmed in both groups, revealing that these intrapersonal and interpersonal indicators of children’s RF are important domains of mentalizing abilities in middle childhood. The results revealed adequate inter-rater reliability of the CRFS. Controlling for the effect of potentially confounding demographic variables, significant differences on CRFS scales between clinical and community groups were found. The clinical group showed lower levels of CRFS scores than normative group, but importantly, the self-focused RF score uniquely predicted clinical/community status. Taken together, the findings showed that the CRFS is a reliable and validity measure for assessing RF in middle childhood with clinical and normative groups, contributing important information to the scientific literature on mentalizing in middle childhood.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".