Investigating Mental State Terms in Fairy Tales and Animation Movies

Abstract

Mentalization can be defined as "keeping one’s own state, desires, and goals in mind as one addresses one’s own experience; and keeping another’s state, desires, and goals in mind, as one interprets his or her behavior”. In recent years, the importance of the mentalization term is emphasized in bullyingaggression studies, therapy and intervention programs, affect regulation, and personality disorders, especially borderline personality disorders. Having an affect on imagination, fairy tales which are used in parent-child interaction are the perfect starting point for mentalization. From this point, fifteen fairy tales from both eastern and western cultures have been investigated in order to assess their mentalization contribution. However, nowadays technological developments have caused changes in sociocultural lives. These changes have led to the replacement of fairy tale books with animation movies. With new and readily available animation technology, children are watching animation movies rather than having stories read to them. For that reason, animation movies are accepted as the postmodern versions of fairy tales and are included in this study. Fifteen most popular animation movies worldwide were picked for the third group. The mental state terms in the texts of animation movies and fairy tales were coded by CS-MST coding system into five main categories, and three groups' results were compared. In conclusion, fairy tales are found to have more mentalization contribution compared to animation movies, and are seen to be precious tools to be used in the improvement of the capacity of mentalization.

Keywords

• Mentalization
• Fairy Tales
• Animation Movies
• CS-MST