Computational support for facilitating parental reflective functioning in everyday parent-child interaction

Abstract

A parent's capacity to understand the mental states of both him/herself and the child is regarded as important in the parent-child relationship. We propose Dyadic Mirror, a wearable smart mirror that is designed to foster this parental capacity in everyday parent-child interactions. Its key feature is to provide a parent with a second-person live-view from the child, i.e., the parent's own face as seen by the child, during their face-to-face interaction. Dyadic Mirror serves as an intuitive cue that helps the parent be aware of (1) his/her emotional state, and (2) the way he/she would be now being seen by the child, thereby facilitating to infer the child's mental state.