Emotional receptivity and cognitive ability to represent the mental state of oneself and other people.A form of social cognition that makes it possible to perceive and interpret human behavior as determined not by purely external, material causes, but by internal intentional states, for example, needs, goals, desires, feelings, ideas. Applied to oneself, mentalization is the ability to discover, through reflection, what circumstances and experiences in the past and present have led to the desires and thoughts that have arisen.