Qualità delle Relazioni Familiari e Funzionamento Psicosociale in Adolescenza: il Ruolo della Mentalizzazione Genitoriale in Famiglie Separate e Intatte / Quality of Family Relationships and Psychosocial Functioning during Adolescence: the Role of Parental Mentalization in Separated and Intact Families

Adolescence represents a transitional period of profound changes at emotional, cognitive, social and behavioral levels, with significant consequences for the overall psychosocial adjustment. Moreover, this phase entails a crisis of conventional family roles, hence requiring a gradual reorganization and redefinition of family relationships. As a matter of fact, during adolescence individuals are driven to seek greater independence, autonomy and differentiation from their primary caregivers, additionally experiencing new attachment relationships. Nevertheless, within this developmental phase parental figures continue to represent a fundamental source of security by offering emotional availability in situations of distress and thus supporting adolescents’ efforts aimed to gain greater autonomy. Starting from these assumptions, and considering the importance of monitoring the adolescence phase not only in terms of presence/absence of clinical symptoms but also looking at adolescents’ perception of wellbeing and satisfaction experienced in different life contexts, the present multi-method, cross-sectional research aimed to explore the possible role played by Parental Reflective Functioning (PRF; Slade, 2005) in influencing adolescents’ psychosocial functioning and quality of family relationships within both intact and separated families. Given this general objective, the present contribution has been organized in three different chapters focused on specific aims and hypothesis, which also considered different individual and relational outcomes. The sample included 72 family triads (42 intact – 30 separated; N = 216 subjects) composed by mother, father and adolescent child aged 13-19 years (M = 15.54, SD = 1.54, 53% girls). The main results showed that: 1) separated parents reported lower levels of PRF compared to united once, while mothers generally reported higher levels of PRF compared to the paternal figures; 2) parental mentalizing was positively associated with quality of family relationships – in terms of adolescents’ attachment dimensional indexes, family satisfaction and perceived parenting; 3) paternal PRF acted as a moderator in the relation between the specific family organization and family satisfaction reported by adolescents, in other words the association between the presence of separated parents and low family satisfaction was significant only at low levels of paternal PRF. In addition, the psychometric properties of the Reflective Functioning Five-Minute Speech Sample (RF-FMSS; Adkins & Fonagy, 2017) were presented. Within the conclusions section, theoretical and clinical implications have been further discussed.