Maiken Winther Pontoppidan

Project title

Redefining Early Risks: A Novel Approach to Mentalization in Expectant Parents

What is your project about?

My project explores how expectant parents understand and respond to their own and each other’s emotions during pregnancy—a capacity known as mentalization. Mentalization is essential for building secure relationships and becoming an attuned parent, yet little is known about how it functions during pregnancy, especially in fathers. By developing and validating a new tool to assess impaired mentalization in both mothers and fathers before the child is born, the project enables early identification of at-risk families. We adapt the Assessment of Representational Risk to provide a more nuanced understanding of emotional and relational difficulties during pregnancy, combining interview data with questionnaires and unique Danish register data. The project generates new knowledge on how impaired mentalization shapes parenting and child development—and how early support can help vulnerable families before problems escalate.

How did you become interested in your particular field of research?

I have always been fascinated by newborns – they enter the world full of potential, shaped by the relationships and environments they encounter. I am especially drawn to how early trauma can shape a person’s life course, particularly when they become parents themselves. If you have experienced abuse and neglect in your own childhood, it can make it difficult to provide care and emotional support to your own child. I am passionate about generating knowledge that gives voice to the most vulnerable families and ensures that support not only arrives early, but is tailored to their needs. I began my research career conducting systematic reviews, which naturally led me to intervention research focused on parenting – because early, targeted support can help break negative cycles and give children a stronger foundation for lifelong well-being.

What are the scientific challenges and perspectives in your project?

A key challenge in this project is adapting an assessment tool originally designed to identify representational risk in parents' concrete descriptions of a child they already know. In our study, we apply it during pregnancy—when parents speak not from lived experience, but from hopes, worries, and imagined interactions with a child yet to be born. This shift makes the material more abstract, and it is uncertain whether indicators of impaired mentalization will be harder—or perhaps even easier—to detect. Once adapted, the tool will be tested on pregnancy interviews with both expecting mothers and fathers to explore whether it captures meaningful aspects of parental representations and whether it can be used reliably in research settings.

What is your estimate of the impact, which your project may have to society in the long term?

The project has the potential to improve early identification of families at risk—already during pregnancy. By developing a valid tool to detect signs of impaired mentalization in expectant parents, we aim to support both research and practice in identifying psychological vulnerability before birth. This could enhance early prevention efforts in prenatal care and family services. The project will also generate new insights into paternal mentalization—an area that remains underexplored—and expand our understanding of similarities and differences in how mothers and fathers mentally represent their unborn child. These findings can help inform more tailored support for families and contribute to breaking intergenerational cycles of risk.

Which impact do you expect the Sapere Aude programme will have on your career as a researcher?

The Sapere Aude grant provides a unique opportunity to deepen my focus on an area I am truly passionate about – early intervention during pregnancy and the transition to parenthood. It enables me to strengthen my skills as a research leader by heading a project that includes both a PhD fellow and a postdoc. The grant also gives me the opportunity to collaborate closely with some of the world’s leading experts in mentalization and early intervention. It strengthens my international profile and allows me to generate practice-oriented knowledge that can benefit vulnerable families and the professionals who support them.