Mentalization describes a person's ability to understand the mental state of him- or herself and others based on overt behavior.

However, these areas are not uniquely associated with mentalization.

Early childhood exposure to mentalization can protect the individual from psychosocial adversity.

In general, individuals with autism show relatively spared performance on tasks that do not require mentalization.

This region was important in deciding how much to invest in a person and hence required mentalization.

The aim of therapy is not developing insight, but the recovery of mentalization.

It applies the principles of mentalization as an aide to emotional regulation with these traumatized parents.

In psychology, mentalization is the ability to understand the mental state, of oneself or others, that underlies overt behaviour.

The temporal poles provide personal experiences for mentalization such as facial recognition, emotional memory and familiar voices.

Mentalization has implications for attachment theory and self-development.

Impaired performance on the mentalization tasks were the first screening task used to diagnose the autism, with a good prediction level.

Another term that David Wallin has used for mentalization is "Thinking about thinking".

Research suggests that gifted adolescents might have deficiencies in social valuation, mentalization, and social adaptive learning.

It has been suggested that affect consciousness and the concept of mentalization partly overlap; however, there are several noted distinctions between the two concepts.

First, compared to mentalization, affect consciousness places more emphasis on the explicit, conscious awareness and expression of affect states.

A summary of mentalization.

They argue that this learning pathway is almost entirely human-specific, requiring as it does the linked psychological function of mentalization to have occurred.

Mentalization factoids - compiled by Frederick Leonhardt.

The object of treatment is that BPD patients increase mentalization capacity which should improve affect regulation and interpersonal relationships.

Mentalization in eating recovery takes the concept of mindfulness one step further, often thought of as mindfulness of mind.

The dynamics of an individual's attachment organization and their capacity for mentalization or conceptualization can play a crucial role in the capacity to be helped by treatment.

This is borne out by the impressive results obtained using Mentalization based treatment, a model that combines dynamic group psychotherapy with individual psychotherapy and case management.

They lack mentalization or Theory of Mind (ToM) and have sensory, perceptual, cognitive, and intellectual deficits.

Lesion studies show that when lesions are imposed to the medial frontal lobe, performance on mentalization tasks is reduced, similar to typical mind-blindness cases.

Mentalization is applied and fostered in three directions in AMBIT:

They define mentalisation as the ability to make and use mental representations of their own and other people's emotional states.

However a study by Stone and colleagues were able to show impaired ToM on mentalisation tasks.

He and A. Bateman proposed in their book Psychotherapy for borderline personality disorder: mentalisation based treatment, a new way to treat BPD.

Looking beyond the roles of bully and victim, CAPSLE's focus is to develop mentalisation skills in the wider school community, by engaging students and teachers in their potential role as bystander.

The primary goals of treatment are to improve mentalisation skills, making connections between the inner experience of relationships and the actual representation, learning how to work with current emotions and how to establish real relationships.

Regular behavioural observations were also conducted during the trail on a randomly chosen group of students, and every six months students were asked to complete questionnaires on acts of aggression, victimisation, bystanding behaviour and mentalisation.

In their award winning book Affect Regulation, Mentalisation and the Development of the Self, Fonagy and his colleagues put forth a detailed theory for the way in which the abilities to mentalise and to regulate affect can determine an individual's successful development.