ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognitive Science
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1546464
This article is part of the Research TopicWhen (and how) Theory of Mind is useful? Evidence from Innovative Assessment Tools, Training, and Treatments Strategies - Volume IIView all 8 articles
Hypermentalizing: The development and validation of a self-report measure
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Houston, Houston, United States
- 2Rice University, Houston, Texas, United States
- 3University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
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Hypermentalizing (referred to as excessive theory of mind or biased mindreading) is defined as the tendency to make assumptions about other people's mental states that go beyond observable data. Despite recent interest in this construct, no self-report measure of hypermentalizing exists.The aim of the current study was to fully operationalize the construct of hypermentalizing by developing a theoretically grounded (attachment-based) self-report measure of hypermentalizing assessing mentalizing related to parents, peers and intimate partners; and evaluate the new measure for its psychometric properties. In Study 1, 745 undergraduate students (mean age 21.12; SD = 2.19) completed the Hypermentalizing Questionnaire (HMZQ) alongside an experimental measure of mentalizing (the Movie Assessment for Social Cognition; MASC).MASC scores for external validity confirmed the purported factor structure of the HMZQ and suggested superiority for the HMZQ version that assesses mentalizing in relation to parents. Study 2 compared HMZQ scores in 364 adolescents between 12-17 years of age (70 adolescents with BPD, 136 psychiatric controls, and 158 healthy controls), and confirmed the superiority of the 26-item version of the HMZQ that assesses mentalizing in relation to parents, in that it was only the HMZQ version that distinguished borderline personality disorder from other psychiatric disorders and healthy controls and. The current study provides evidence in support of the HMZQ to assess hypermentalizing in typical and atypical populations of adolescents and young adults.
Keywords: hypermentaling, personality disorder, assessment, Psychopathology, Theory of Mind
Received: 16 Dec 2024; Accepted: 12 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Sharp, Barr and Vanwoerden. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Carla Sharp, University of Houston, Houston, United States
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