ABSTRACT
Maternal mind-mindedness, which examines mothers’ representational capacity to treat their children as individuals with their own minds, has traditionally been operationalized by coding mothers’ mental state comments to or about their children. Mind-mindedness has been studied predominantly in Western cultures, where it predicts children’s social-cognitive developments. However, in many non-Western cultures, mothers do not readily talk about their children’s mental states; they may use nonverbal behaviors to manifest their mind-mindedness. Nonverbal behaviors may also be the way mind-mindedness is conveyed to young infants. Theorists have been puzzled by the fact that mind-mindedness in mothers’ speech prior to when infants understand language predicts infants’ later social-cognitive developments. In this article, I call for mind-mindedness measures to include nonverbal behaviors. Such measures may reveal behaviors involved in communicating mind-mindedness to infants and provide an avenue to equitable investigations of mind-mindedness in diverse cultures, thus advancing the theory and scope of the field.