Citation

McCarthy RJ, Skowronski JJ, Crouch JL, Milner JS. Child Abuse Negl. 2017; 67: 419-428.

Affiliation

Center for the Study of Family Violence and Sexual Assault, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, United States.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.chiabu.2017.02.005

PMID

28216255

Abstract

Parents' evaluations of children are believed to be a cognitive contributor to their subsequent child-directed harsh or physically abusive behaviors. The current research examined whether parents' (N=100) evaluations of children were moderated by either (a) the child behavior on which the evaluation was based and (b) parents' measured risk for child physical abuse. The study also explored whether parents' evaluations of children were related to their tendencies to symbolically harm their child. The current study also used a novel method to indirectly assess parents' evaluations of children: A modified Affect Misattribution Procedure. Contrary to a priori expectations, negative evaluations of children were stronger for parents who were at low risk, relative to high risk, for child physical abuse. Nonetheless, we observed that high-risk parents were more likely than low-risk parents to inflict symbolic harm onto their child. In an exploratory analysis we observed that parents who formed more overall negative evaluations of children engaged in more symbolic harm to their child. Although high-risk parents were more likely to symbolically harm their child than low-risk parents, this effect does not seem to be due to high-risk parents' negative child evaluations from negative child behaviors.

Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Language: en

Keywords

Child abuse potential; Physical child abuse; Spontaneous trait inferences; Voodoo Doll task