University of North Carolina, Greensboro, Department of Psychology, Greensboro, NC 27402-6170, USA.
Child Abuse Negl. 2012 Jul-Aug;36(7-8):564-71. doi: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2012.05.004. Epub 2012 Aug 1.
Researchers in the child maltreatment field have traditionally relied on explicit self-reports to study factors that may exacerbate physical child abuse risk. The current investigation evaluated an implicit analog task utilizing eye tracking technology to assess both parental attributions of child misbehavior and empathy.
Based on the observation that readers experience comprehension difficulty when encountering passages inconsistent with their beliefs, an eye tracker gauged the extent of difficulty parents experienced reading vignettes that inappropriately characterized a child as culpable for misbehavior and that presented a non-empathic child interaction.
Results suggest self-reports of attributions and empathy are related to both child abuse potential and discipline intentions; however, the eye tracking analog for empathy correlated with abuse potential but not punishment decisions whereas the analog for attributions correlated with punishment decisions but not abuse potential.
Such contrasts between self-report and analog assessment underscore the need for continued research studying theorized abuse risk constructs using alternative approaches to better identify the important risk markers associated with elevated child abuse risk and to minimize methodological overlap.
儿童虐待领域的研究人员传统上依赖明确的自我报告来研究可能加剧身体虐待风险的因素。本研究利用眼动追踪技术评估了一种内隐类比任务，以评估父母对儿童不良行为的归因和同理心。
基于读者在遇到与他们的信念不一致的段落时会经历理解困难的观察，眼动追踪器衡量了父母在阅读描述不当的儿童行为有罪的情境和呈现非同理心的儿童互动的情境时所经历的困难程度。
结果表明，归因和同理心的自我报告与虐待儿童的可能性和纪律意图有关；然而，同理心的眼动追踪类比与虐待可能性相关，但与惩罚决策无关，而归因的类比与惩罚决策相关，但与虐待可能性无关。
自我报告和类比评估之间的这种对比突显了需要继续使用替代方法研究理论上的虐待风险结构的研究，以更好地确定与升高的儿童虐待风险相关的重要风险标志物，并最小化方法上的重叠。
