ArticleChild psychiatry and human development2020
Longitudinal Relationships Between Reflective Functioning, Empathy, and Externalizing Behaviors During Adolescence and Young Adulthood.
Article in Child psychiatry and human development, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 34 citations in OpenAlex.
- Defending Behavior in Bullying and Defenders' Psychosocial Outcomes among Children and Adolescents: A Series of Three-Level Meta-Analyses.Journal of youth and adolescence · 2025Pooled it
- Emotional Valence Influences Empathic Capacity in Adolescence and Young Adulthood.Journal of adolescence · 2026Article
- Attachment Problems and Mentalizing Capacity Relate to Parent-Child Informant Discrepancies in Female Adolescents with Borderline Personality Disorder.Child psychiatry and human development · 2026Article
- Mentalizing Oneself and Others in Anorexia Nervosa: From Subjective Evaluation to Performance.Journal of clinical psychology · 2025Article
- Validation of the Mentalization Scale (MentS) in francophone control and clinical samples.PloS one · 2025Article
- Validation of the Three-Factor Reflective Functioning Questionnaire for Youth in a Chinese Adolescent Sample.Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment · 2024Article
- Atypical functional connectome is associated with low reflective functioning in incarcerated adolescents.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
- Mentalization in Typically and Atypically Developing Iranian Children and Its Associations with Age, Sex, and Externalizing/Internalizing Symptoms.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Enhancing mentalization by specific interventions within mentalization-based treatment of adolescents with conduct disorder.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Exploring Multivariate Profiles of Psychological Distress and Empathy in Early Adolescent Victims, Bullies, and Bystanders Involved in Cyberbullying Episodes.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- The Italian version of the Reflective Functioning Questionnaire: Validity within a sample of adolescents and associations with psychological problems and alexithymia.Journal of clinical psychology · 2022Article
- The Influence of Student-Teacher Relationship on School-Age Children's Empathy: The Mediating Role of Emotional Intelligence.Psychology research and behavior management · 2022Article
- Self and Other Mentalizing Polarities and Dimensions of Mental Health: Association With Types of Symptoms, Functioning and Well-Being.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Convergent Validity of Three Measures of Reflective Function: Parent Development Interview, Parental Reflective Function Questionnaire, and Reflective Function Questionnaire.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Reflective functioning (RF) refers to the understanding of one's own and others' behaviors in terms of mental states, whereas empathy entails the abilities to understand (cognitive empathy) and to share (affective empathy) the emotions of others. Low RF and low empathy have been previously related to externalizing behaviors, such as aggression and rule breaking. However, few longitudinal studies have simultaneously examined the relationships between these variables during adolescence. The aim of the present study is to investigate the longitudinal effects of both RF and empathy on potential changes in externalizing behaviors over time, in a group of 103 adolescents and young adults from the general population assessed repeatedly up to four times. We conducted multilevel analysis in order to examine the effects of RF and empathy on the initial levels and the trajectories of externalizing behaviors over time, while accounting for other variables previously associated with externalizing behaviors, such as age, gender, internalizing problems, and cognitive abilities. The results suggest that the ability to reflect on behaviors in terms of mental states predicted a sharper decrease in externalizing behaviors over time. Moreover, externalizing behaviors at the first assessment were associated with RF impairments and low affective empathy. Age, gender, cognitive abilities, and cognitive empathy were not associated with externalizing behaviors. We discuss how our results, based on a typically developing population, might inform primary or indicated prevention strategies for externalizing behaviors by focusing on socio-cognitive processes such as RF and affective empathy.
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