Maternal mind-mindedness, defined as the propensity to view one’s child as an agent with independent thoughts and feelings, mitigates the impact of low maternal education on conduct problems in young children (Meins et al. 2013), but has been little studied beyond the preschool years. Addressing this gap, we applied a multi-measure and multi-informant approach to assess family adversity and disruptive behavior at age 12 for a socially diverse sample of 116 children for whom ratings of disruptive behavior at age 6 were available. Each mother was asked to describe her child and transcripts of these five-minute speech samples were coded for (i) mind-mindedness (defined by the proportion of child attributes that were mental rather than physical or behavioral) and (ii) positivity (defined by the proportion of child attributes that were positive rather than neutral or negative). Our regression results showed that, independent of associations with prior adjustment, family adversity, child gender and low maternal monitoring, mothers’ mind-mindedness (but not positivity) predicted unique variance in disruptive behavior at age 12. In addition, a trend interaction term provided partial support for the hypothesis that pre-adolescents exposed to family adversity may benefit in particular from maternal mind-mindedness. We discuss the possible mechanisms underpinning these findings and their implications for clinical interventions to reduce disruptive behavior in adolescence.

Metacognition is important for monitoring and regulating cognitive processes, decision- making, problem-solving and learning. Despite widespread interest in metacognition, measuring metacognition in children poses a significant challenge. Some qualitative and observational measures exist, but are restricted by scalability, range of metacognitive components measured, and use of different measurement metrics compared with tasks for adults. Children aged 7-12 years (N = 204) completed a new metacognition task for problem solving, the Zoo Task, and a standard metacognition of memory task. The results indicate that this novel task is reliable and valid, and could bridge existing measures of metacognition for children and adults. The findings suggest that metacognition is domain-general, however, there might be some domain-specificity due to the low effect-sizes.

Author Contributions. Ellefson, Serpell and Parr submitted the initial grant application and study concept. Aldercotte, Ellefson and Serpell developed the task. Ellefson oversaw the development of the Thinking Games website. Data collection was supervised by Ellefson, Serpell, Aldercotte and Parr. Aldercotte, Ellefson and Tsapali completed the initial data entry and devised the coding scheme for the initial seven categories for the Zoo task for the pilot and main study. Ellefson, Serpell and Aldercotte managed and conducted the scoring, data entry, data cleaning and all other general data management for the metamemory, problem-solving and general cognitive ability tasks. Ellefson, Patel and Tsapali prepared the open science data files and task descriptions. Patel developed and implemented the coding schemes for task accuracy, metacognitive control, monitoring, and evaluation measures as well as the absolute accuracy and bias. Patel analyzed and interpreted the results here as well as for a thesis submitted as partial fulfillment of a master's degree at the University of Cambridge. Patel and Ellefson drafted the manuscript, with critical revisions from Tsapali, Serpell and Parr. All authors approved the final draft.Further Acknowledgements. This manuscript extends the analyses conducted in Jwalin Patel's thesis, which was completed as a part of an MPhil degree program at the University of

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