Development and validation of the Mental-Physical Verb Norms (MPVN): A Text Analysis Measure of Mental State Attribution

Abstract

Attribution of mental states to self and others, i.e., mentalizing, is central to human life. Current measures are lacking in ability to directly gauge the extent of individuals engage in spontaneous mentalizing. Focusing on natural language use as an expression of inner psychological processes, we developed the Mental-Physical Verb Norms (MPVN). These norms are participant-derived ratings of the extent to which common verbs reflect mental (opposite physical) activities and occurrences, covering ~80% of all verbs appearing within a given English text. Content validity was assessed against existing expert-compiled dictionaries of mental states and cognitive processes, as well as against normative ratings of verb concreteness. Criterion Validity was assessed through natural text analysis of internet comments relating to mental health vs. physical health. Results showcase the unique contribution of the MPVN ratings as a measure of the degree to which individuals adopt the intentional stance in describing targets, by describing both self and others in mental, opposite physical terms. We discuss potential uses for future research across various psychological and neurocognitive disciplines.

Parental Mentalizing During a Pandemic: Use of Mental-State Language on Parenting Social Media Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…MSL. We measured parents' use of MSL using two measures: (a) frequency of mental-state terms based on a new MSL dictionary created for this study and (b) the Mental-Physical Verb Norms Scale (Orr & Gilead, 2021). As described below, these measures were created by employing two different measure-development approaches, which resulted in different outcome variables and, ultimately, data-analytic approaches.…”

“…We measured parents' use of MSL using two measures: (1) frequency of mental-state terms based on a new MSL dictionary created for this study, and (2) the Mental-Physical Verb Norms measure (Orr & Gilead, 2021). As described below, these measures were created by employing two different measure-development approaches resulting in different outcome variables, and ultimately data analytic approaches, providing the opportunity to assess both the robustness and convergent validity of our findings in this first examination of parental mentalizing on social media posts.…”

“…Mental-physical verb norms. We applied the "Mental-Physical Verb Norms" scale devised by Orr and Gilead (2021). The scale contains the 250 most frequently used verbs in the English language (about 80% of all verbs used in typical corpora), each rated by English speakers on a scale between "0" (strictly physical activity) and "100" (strictly mental activity).…”

Study development and protocol for a cohort study examining the impact of baseline social cognition on response to treatment for people living with post-traumatic stress disorder

“…The RFQ-8 has a specific scoring system to follow that produces certain and uncertain reflective functioning scores (Fonagy et al, 2016 ). We will score the STOMP by comparing the relative amount of mental state versus non-mental state language used in the free text (Orr & Gilead, 2021 ; Rice & Redkay, 2015 ). We will examine the inter-correlation between social cognition task measures (Warnell & Redcay, 2019 ) and if appropriate apply data reduction techniques (e.g.…”