Commentary on mentalization and culture

摘要

It is a pleasure to write a commentary to Aival-Naveh, Rothschild-Yakar, and Kurman (2019) article, "Keeping culture in mind: A systematic review and initial conceptualization of mentalizing from a cross-cultural perspective." The article breaks new ground in pressing issues concerning the impact of culture on the construct of mentalization. Indeed, reading this article has the uncanny effect of making one wonder how such an obvious concern has been overlooked, as well as opening up a wide swath of intriguing questions and potential avenues of research. The article is particularly exciting for us as our research group has begun to explore similar ground, focusing on issues that have emerged with the translation of the Mentalized Affectivity Scale (MAS), a self-report measure that we have created, specifically grappling with cultural differences in the expressing of emotions, one component of mentalization (Greenberg, Kolasi, Hegsted, Berkowitz, & Jurist, 2017; Jurist, 2018). We will have the opportunity to say more about our work later in this commentary, but first we would like to give the article its due justice.