TABLE 1.

Hypothesized relationship between reflective functioning, recent substance use, emotion regulation, and maternal sensitivity

Reflective Functioning	Substance Use	Emotion Language Word Usea	Sensitivity
High	Low	Low positive feeling word use High negative feeling word use	High
		Have you ever felt like you really needed someone to take care of you? Can you tell me about a time in the last week or two when you felt this way? Over like this weekend, past couple days, uh huh, …. And I guess it’s my fault too because I hate a mess, so he knows that I will clean it. And that’s what I talk to [therapist] about too, it gets me mad because my husband, like I said, he don’t want to do nothing to help me, but yet, every time his mother calls, he runs and does all these things for her all the time. Hmm.…. Hmm. How do you feel at that time, at those times? Oh it gets me so mad. It—he tells me I’m jealous of his mother. I’m like, “I’m not jealous of her.” I’m like, “these are things you should be doing your house first, besides, before over there.” …b Word Frequencyc: Positive Feeling Words = 1.60; Negative Emotion Words = 2.24
Low	High	High positive feeling word use Low negative feeling word use	Low
		Have you ever felt like you really needed someone to take care of you? Someone to take care of me? Um hmm. Hmm. No.… I have ta teach that birdie [referring to child] ta fly. Hm. So, my concentration’s on him. Hmm. Okay. Forget about my needs, right now. Hm. It’s all about him. Hm. Okay. How do you think, um, when you do feel like you need someone to take care of you, how do you think that that affects [child]? I think it doesn’t. Cause I, I give him all the attention that I can. Hm. Ya do it day by day, I don’t know. I don’t need nobody to take care a me. Hm. I don’t. I just need myself. Hm. And I need myself to take care of [child]. Hm. So if I’m not good, then he ain’t good. Hm. If I’m not happy, he ain’t happy. Hm. So I just gotta, I gotta do what I gotta do. Hm. Y’know what I’m sayin’? Just, it don’t bother me. Word Frequencyc: Positive Feeling Words = .59; Negative Emotion Words = 3.07

^aNote that the self-focused section of the interview contains questions that probe the parent’s intimate and negative emotional experiences related to parenting; therefore, in the context of being asked to discuss negative emotional experiences, using frequent positive feeling words and infrequent negative emotion words can be construed as emotional avoidance of the topic.

^bInterviewer questions/comments included in italics. All interviewer utterances were removed from transcripts before they were subjected to Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count system analysis, but are included here for ease of interpretation.

^cWord-count frequency levels here pertain to the mother’s entire self-focused section of the Parent Development Interview, not the excerpt presented in this table.