In psychology, mentalization is the ability to understand the mental state – of oneself or others – that underlies overt behaviour. Mentalization can be seen as a form of imaginative mental activity that lets us perceive and interpret human behaviour in terms of intentional mental states (e.g., needs, desires, feelings, beliefs, goals, purposes, and reasons). It is sometimes described as "understanding misunderstanding." Another term that David Wallin has used for mentalization is "Thinking about thinking". Mentalization can occur either automatically or consciously.
In psychology, mentalization is the ability to understand the mental state – of oneself or others – that underlies overt behaviour. Mentalization can be seen as a form of imaginative mental activity that lets us perceive and interpret human behaviour in terms of intentional mental states (e.g., needs, desires, feelings, beliefs, goals, purposes, and reasons). It is sometimes described as "understanding misunderstanding." Another term that David Wallin has used for mentalization is "Thinking about thinking". Mentalization can occur either automatically or consciously.
==Background== While the broader concept of theory of mind has been explored at least since Descartes, the specific term 'mentalization' emerged in psychoanalytic literature in the late 1960s, and began to be empirically tested in 1983 when Heinz Wimmer and Josef Perner ran the first experiment to investigate when children can understand false belief, inspired by Daniel Dennett's interpretation of a Punch and Judy scene.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).