Suchergebnisse

AbstractCognitive and emotional processes were examined in maltreated children with a history of physical abuse (n = 76), children with a history of maltreatment other than physical abuse (i.e., sexual abuse, physical neglect, and emotional maltreatment; n = 91), and a group of non‐maltreated comparison children (N = 100). Physical abuse was associated with errors in cue interpretation, easy access to aggressive responses to conflict, and poor emotion regulation. In turn, maladaptive cognitive and emotional processes made unique contributions to explaining the relationship between physical abuse and peer nominations of aggression and disruptive behavior. Maltreated children who had not been physically abused evidenced a trend toward cognitive and emotional maladaptation, but only poor emotion regulation accounted for aggression and disruptive behavior in these children. The findings emphasize the importance of considering multiple domains of development in efforts to understand how varying forms of child maltreatment contribute to later maladjustment.

AbstractThe developmental study of social adaptation in maltreated children provided the context for examining the linkages between family and peer relations. Participants included 115 school‐age children; 59 were maltreated. Teachers and peers in the classrooms of the targeted children provided assessments of the social functioning of individual children. Mothers completed an assessment of their parenting practices. The results demonstrated that teachers perceived maltreated children, particularly physically abused children, as lower in social competence and social acceptance and higher in externalizing behavior problems. Peers were more likely to actively withdraw from or reject maltreated children. Patterns of peer‐perceived aggression and withdrawal were examined, and maltreated children who were both aggressive and withdrawn were particularly deficient in social effectiveness. Maltreatment and parenting practices were related to differences in social effectiveness. Continuities in relationship disturbance from families to peers were discussed.

This study examined the neural correlates of facial affect processing in 15 month-old maltreated and nonmaltreated infants. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were elicited while infants passively viewed standardized pictures of female models posing angry, happy, and neutral facial expressions. Differences between maltreated ( N = 25) and nonmaltreated ( N = 20) infants were observed on three ERP components: P1, P260, and Nc. The results for the P260 waveform were consistent with previous ERP findings in older maltreated children, showing a hyperresponsivity to angry facial affect relative to happy in maltreated infants. However, the findings for the P1 and Nc indicated a hyperresponsivity to relative affective novelty, whereby the maltreated infants had greater amplitude in response to happy facial affect, whereas nonmaltreated infants had greater responsivity to angry faces. The results provided further support for the hypothesis that the experience of maltreatment and the predominantly negative emotional tone in maltreating families alters the functioning of neural systems associated with the processing of facial emotion. In particular, the findings suggested that at this early stage in the development of facial affect recognition, novelty of facial emotion is especially salient. These results exemplify the importance of early preventive interventions focused on emotion for children who have experienced maltreatment early in life.

AbstractAlthough child maltreatment has often been described as leading to language deficits, the few well‐controlled investigations of language acquisition in maltreated children have focused on language content rather than form, or have used qualitative rather than quantitative measures. This study examines syntactic complexity in 19 maltreated and 14 nonmaltreated preschool‐aged children. Mother–child dyads participated in play sessions that were transcribed and scored for the presence of morphosyntactic forms in child speech and for specific sentence constructions in maternal speech. Findings indicated that child maltreatment was associated with language delay in both vocabulary and production of syntactic structures. There were also qualitative differences in characteristics of maternal utterances between maltreating and comparison groups. Because maltreatment initially occurred before age 2, this study highlights the long‐lasting negative influence of maltreatment on language development and also provides the first demonstration of child language delays and differences in maternal speech within a single maltreatment sample.