@mastersthesis{bal2025literary,
  author = {Bal, Onur},
  title = {Literary Work Readership and Its Relationship with Mentalisation and Empathy},
  school = {Yeditepe University},
  year = {2025},
  type = {Master's thesis},
  url = {https://onurbal.com/en/academics/thesis/}
}

2.1. From Attribution of Mental States to Mentalisation and Empathy

Early work on mindreading treated the attribution of beliefs and desires as a largely intellectual exercise, but subsequent attachment-based research demonstrated that the same capacity is fundamentally affective and relational. Fonagy and Target (1997) showed that infants internalise an understanding of mind not through abstract inference but through caregivers’ emotionally attuned mirroring of their inner states. This process, termed reflective functioning, is the developmental engine that transforms simple mental-state attribution into full mentalisation, providing the scaffolding for later empathic concern and prosocial behaviour (Fonagy, et al., 1991; Fonagy et al., 2002).

2.1.1. Mentalisation: A Multidimensional Social-Cognitive Capacity

With the foundational work of Premack and Woodruff (1978), who asked the now-famous question, “does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?”, ToM became a formal field of research within psychology. This question marked the start of decades of research into how humans, particularly children, come to understand that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions different from their own. The development of ToM was most notably studied through false-belief tasks (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). Usually demonstrated through the “Sally–Anne” scenario, this task evaluates a child’s capacity to understand that another person could have a belief different from either reality or the child’s own knowledge (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). Along the course of normal development, children succeed at this task around the age of four, marking the first strong evidence of ToM acquisition (Wellman, et al., 2001).

Throughout the late 1980s and the 1990s, research broadened the conceptualisation of ToM beyond the grasp of false beliefs to include the comprehension of deceit, irony, sarcasm, metaphor, and other forms of non-literal communication (Happé, 1993). Subsequent studies have underlined that ToM is not a monolithic faculty but a constellation of processes that operate either explicitly (that is, consciously and with effort) or implicitly, automatically and without reflection (Apperly & Butterfill, 2009). Moreover, evidence indicates that cognitive elements of ToM (inferring beliefs, intentions, and knowledge) and affective elements (understanding or sharing emotions) follow partially separate developmental timelines from preschool through adolescence (Peterson & Wellman, 2019) and rely on partly distinct neural networks (Frith & Frith, 2012; Shamay-Tsoory, 2011).

Today, ToM is recognised as a multifaceted construct shaped by developmental, cultural, and environmental factors, combining biological predispositions with social learning (Schaafsma et al., 2015). While it remains a cornerstone of social-cognition research, scholars increasingly emphasise the need for broader frameworks that incorporate not only cognitive inference but also emotional and relational sensitivity. One such framework is mentalisation, which builds on and extends ToM by stressing the capacity to reflect on one’s own and others’ mental states within emotionally meaningful contexts.

Mentalisation emerges in early attachment relationships and continues to develop across the lifespan, moving along the implicit-to-explicit continuum described by Lieberman (2007) as it progresses from preverbal caregiver–infant exchanges to sophisticated self–other reflections in adulthood. Mentalisation operates at both conscious and pre-reflective levels, integrating what Lieberman (2007) terms explicit and implicit processes. In infancy, caregivers’ accurate mirroring of the child’s internal states fosters implicit mentalising: the baby comes to “feel felt” and begins to expect that mental states govern behaviour (Fonagy et al., 1991). During the preschool years, secure attachment predicts mastery of false-belief tasks, marking the transition to explicit recognition that others can hold perspectives different from one’s own (Fonagy & Target, 1997). Middle childhood and adolescence bring further differentiation, as children refine the ability to toggle between self- and other-focused viewpoints and to integrate cognitive (beliefs, intentions) with affective (emotions) components of social understanding (Dumontheil et al., 2010; Sebastian et al., 2012). In adulthood, mentalisation is shaped continuously by new relational contexts (e.g. romantic partnerships, parenthood, and professional roles) while remaining sensitive to stress that can “down-shift” functioning to earlier, more automatic modes (Fonagy & Luyten, 2009). Thus the capacity first cultivated within parent–infant attachment is elaborated, reorganised, and sometimes compromised throughout the lifespan, reflecting both ongoing neural maturation and the quality of later interpersonal experiences (Fonagy & Bateman, 2019).

2.1.2. The Function of Mentalisation in Social Cognitive Process

Mentalisation plays a central role in enabling individuals to navigate the complexities of social life by making sense of their own and others’ internal experiences, a capacity indexed empirically by reflective functioning (RF). Acquired in infancy through caregivers’ attuned mirroring, high parental RF predicts secure attachment and fosters children’s early ToM success, setting the trajectory for adaptive emotion regulation and prosocial behaviour in later development (Fonagy et al., 1991; Fonagy & Target, 1997). Across childhood and adolescence, growing RF supports increasingly sophisticated perspective-taking, negotiation of peer conflict, and academic engagement, while in adulthood it underpins self-soothing under stress, empathic attunement in intimate relationships, and flexible shifts between rapid, implicit readings of social cues and slower, explicit reflection when automatic assumptions fail (Fonagy & Luyten, 2009). Deficits or imbalances in RF constitute a transdiagnostic vulnerability: under high affective load, some individuals “hyper-mentalise” (over-interpret yet misconstrue others’ motives), whereas others collapse into non-mentalising modes characterised by impulsive action or concrete thinking, which are patterns observed in borderline personality disorder, trauma-related disorders, and certain externalising pathways (Allen et al., 2008; Fonagy & Bateman, 2019). Thus, RF functions as a developmental bridge linking early attachment quality to life-span outcomes in self-regulation, relationship quality, and mental health.

Mental state attribution and reasoning not only underpins everyday social interactions but also fuels creative engagement with stories: readers continuously track characters’ motives, infer hidden intentions, and predict outcomes (Mar & Oatley, 2008; Oatley, 1999). Evidence shows that this capacity is context-sensitive: education, cultural background, anxiety, and even brief exposure to narrative fiction can modulate performance on empathy and ToM tasks (Kidd & Castano, 2013; Mar et al., 2006). For example, reading literary fiction, which is rich in complex, ambiguously motivated characters, has been found to increase subsequent scores on mental-state attribution and empathy measures, presumably because such texts demand intensive perspective-taking (Dodell-Feder & Tamir, 2018; Kidd & Castano, 2013; Mar et al., 2006). Although most studies frame these effects in ToM or empathy terms, the present thesis interprets them within the broader construct of mentalisation, which encompasses not only making correct inferences about others’ mental states, but also emotional insight, self-reflection, and relational context (Fonagy & Bateman, 2019).

2.1.3. Mentalisation in Relation to Self–Other Understanding and Empathy

Mentalisation integrates two complementary capacities (self-related mentalisation and other-related mentalisation) that together provide the cognitive architecture of mental state attribution. Self-related mentalisation refers to recognising and regulating one’s own thoughts and feelings, a prerequisite for reflective self-control and affect regulation; other-related mentalisation involves inferring the beliefs, intentions, and emotions of those around us, allowing accurate prosocial responsiveness, which together provide the cognitive architecture of mental state attribution, supported by evidence for distinct neural system for self- and other-related social cognition (Amodio & Frith, 2006).

Empathy itself comprises two partially dissociable components: an affective facet involving automatic emotional resonance with others and a cognitive facet entailing deliberate perspective-taking (Decety & Jackson, 2004). When these capacities operate in tandem, they generate the double helix of empathy: affective attunement grounded in an internal sense of “what it feels like,” and cognitive perspective-taking that appreciates “how it must be for you” (Shamay-Tsoory, 2011). Mentalisation is most strongly tied to the cognitive aspect of empathy; higher self-related and other-related mentalisation scores predict better performance on perspective-taking tasks and elevated scores on cognitive-empathy subscales of multidimensional empathy inventories (Mazza et al., 2014). At the same time, balanced self-related mentalisation tempers affective sharing, preventing emotional contagion from overwhelming self-boundaries and thereby sustaining pro-social concern (Fonagy & Bateman, 2019).

Longitudinal attachment studies support this dual-facet model. High parental reflective functioning, the capacity to discuss attachment experiences in mental-state terms, predicts balanced growth of children’s self-related and other-related mentalisation and, in turn, higher cognitive-empathy scores in middle childhood (Ensink & Mayes, 2010; Fonagy & Target, 1997). Conversely, disrupted attachment or low caregiver RF is associated with asymmetric profiles: some children over-read others while remaining unaware of their own affect, whereas others show the opposite pattern (Sharp et al., 2011). These findings indicate that both implicit, pre-reflective attunement and explicit, conscious perspective-taking must be integrated early for empathy to flourish across development (Fonagy, et al., 2002).

Balanced development of self-related and other-related mentalisation is linked to favourable social outcomes throughout life, including cooperative problem-solving, relationship satisfaction, and resilience under stress (Allen et al., 2008). By contrast, an imbalance invites difficulty. Individuals who over-focus on others’ minds can become hyper-mentalising (i.e. over-interpreting motives and generating inaccurate, often paranoid, social narratives). Those who under-represent their own inner states may drift into alexithymia, struggling to label feelings and to draw on them for decision-making. Both patterns are observed trans-diagnostically, from externalising trajectories to personality pathology, and illustrate Luyten and colleagues’ (2020) contention that psychological wellbeing depends on flexible movement along the self–other axis of mentalisation.

Crucially, mentalisation remains open to experiential refinement. Engagement with literary fiction, for instance, exposes readers to richly layered characters whose motives must be inferred from subtle cues; even brief exposure has been shown to boost performance on empathy and ToM tasks (Dodell-Feder & Tamir, 2018; Kidd & Castano, 2013). Such findings highlight the plasticity of the system: social learning, cultural practices (Mar et al., 2006), and targeted mentalisation-based interventions (Luyten et al., 2020) can strengthen both poles of mentalisation, fostering a more integrated empathic stance that supports adaptive functioning across diverse relational contexts.