RECOGNIZING EMOTIONS, ATTACHMENT AND MENTALIZATION CAPACITY

Abstract

The research deals with the establishing of the relation between the recognizing of facial expressions of emotions, attachment, and mentalization capacity. For the recognizing of facial expressions of emotions we used the test JACFEE (Matsumoto and Ekman’s Japanese and Caucasian Facial Expressions of Emotion, 1988), for the exploring of attachment we used “Serbian version of modified and Revised Experiences in Close Relationships scale (SM–ECR–R)“ (Hanak & Dimitrijević, 2013), whereas the assessment of mentalization capacity was performed using “The Mentalization Scale (MentS)” (Dimitrijević, Hanak, Altaras Dimitrijević, & Jolić Marjanović, 2018). The research sample comprised 206 students of Preschool Teacher Training College in Kruševac. The results have demonstrated there is an association between the attachment dimensions and mentalization capacity, as well as that successfulness at recognizing facial expressions of emotions can be predicted on the grounds of tested predictors which explain 8.6% of dependent-variable variance. The anxiety dimension has a negatively-correlated significant partial contribution to this prediction, as does the total mentalization capacity.