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(2017) 'Proof of concept of a mind-mindedness intervention for mothers hospitalized for severe mental illness.', Development and psychopathology., 29 (2). pp. 555-564.Further information on publisher's website: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details.

Women with depression are less likely to use recommended infant care practices only when they also meet criteria for co-morbid personality disorder. Professionals working with women and babies need to consider the particular difficulties that mothers with both personality disorder and depression may have in providing satisfactory infant care.

This study investigated relations between mind‐mindedness in mothers with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and mental state understanding in their children. Participants were 20 mothers with BPD and 19 mothers without personality disorder and their children, aged 39–61 months. Children's mental state understanding was examined via a battery of theory of mind and emotion labelling tasks. Maternal mind‐mindedness was assessed by mothers' use of mental state references to describe their children relative to other attributes. Maternal BPD was associated with fewer references to children's mental states as well as poorer levels of mental state understanding in their children. Findings lend some empirical support to recent theoretical suggestions that BPD is associated with a reduced capacity for mentalization, as well as reduced capacity for mental state understanding in children of mothers with BPD. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.