Mental State Language in Chilean Storybooks: Does Writers’ Nationality and Gender Matter?

Children’s books are a useful tool to enhance mentalization since they usually contain multiple references to mental states, thus providing potential opportunities to mentalize. Studying the factors that influence mentalization is fundamental since this ability is essential for children´s socioemotional development. An exploratory study was designed to analyze mental state language (MSL) in storybooks for 3- and 4-year-old children in Chile and compare MSL use by writers of different nationalities and sexes. The sample consisted of 40 books from male and female writers from Chile and Spain. Our results showed that the most referred mental references were desires, cognitions, and emotions. Differences were found according to the writers’ nationality for cognitions, as well as in the interaction between nationality and gender for references to desires and cognitions. Our results imply that books differ in frequency and type of references to mental states, according to the cultural background of the writer.