The Role of Adolescent Mentalizing and Parental Reflective Functioning for Adolescents' Peer Relationships
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Given the crucial role peer relationships play for the well-being of adolescents, it is important to understand the factors that support adolescents' ability to form positive relationships with peers. Within early childhood, both children's mentalizing and parents' ability to reason about their children's mental states relate to positive social outcomes; however, markedly less is known about such associations during adolescence. Addressing this gap, the present work examines parental reflective functioning in relation to adolescents' peer relationships, while also exploring whether adolescents' own mentalizing skills may account for such associations. METHOD: Through data collection within Canada, pairs of parents/caregivers and adolescents (ages 12-15, N = 87, 44 girls) separately completed a measure of youths' peer relationships (prosocial behaviour and peer problems). Adolescents completed task-based and self-report measures of mentalizing, while parents completed measures of their general mentalizing ability and parental reflective functioning. RESULTS: Youth with better mentalizing skills (task and/or self-report) reported more positive and fewer negative peer relationships. Parent reflective functioning, but not general mentalizing, was associated with more prosocial behaviours. Parent-youth agreement on peer relationships was highest when both parents and youth reported higher mentalizing skills. CONCLUSIONS: From a theoretical standpoint, findings suggest the important role of parental reflective functioning and youth mentalizing for models of social development. In terms of methodological implications, task and self-report of youth mentalizing were related but differentially predicted peer problems. Practically speaking, findings suggest that bolstering parents reflective functioning may support the development of adolescents' mentalizing skills and positive peer relationships.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".