Gender differences in young preadolescents’ mindreading abilities and well-being.

Recent longitudinal evidence shows that the relation between cognition and subjective well-being is partially explained by other factors. We investigated whether mindreading skills were linked to life satisfaction and anxiety in middle school-aged children. Research on children’s social and emotional experiences during the transition into adolescence shows the emergence of anxiety symptoms, with girls often scoring higher than boys. High levels of anxiety are usually related to lower life satisfaction. In contrast, little findings exist on mindreading and anxiety. That is, there remains a lack of research on specific dimensions of anxiety, and on the specific mentalization skills. Therefore, our aim was to investigate individual differences in those constructs and gendered relational patterns among preadolescents. A sample of 142 sixth- and seventh-graders (84 boys) was recruited in Northern Italy and completed tests regarding theory-of-mind skills, perceptions of different subtypes of anxiety, and life satisfaction. Although no interrelations were found among the variables for total sample, separate gender analyses conducted using Hayes’ PROCESS mediation tool showed significant results. Specifically, only among girls, higher levels of theory-of-mind skills were associated with lower levels of life satisfaction through the mediation of higher levels in generalized anxiety. That is, for girls only, the combination of higher mindreading skills with higher levels of anxiety led to feelings of lower life satisfaction. The identification of such a mediation pattern suggests that the approach to adolescence might be a timely intervention window to prevent the development of internalizing symptoms and their cascade effects on young people’s well-being.