Rodriguez Christina M, Russa Mary Bower, Kircher John C
University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA.
Grand Valley State University, USA.
Child Abuse Negl. 2015 Aug;46:121-31. doi: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2015.02.017. Epub 2015 Mar 19.
Although frustration has long been implicated in promoting aggression, the potential for poor frustration tolerance to function as a risk factor for physical child abuse risk has received minimal attention. Instead, much of the extant literature has examined the role of anger in physical abuse risk, relying on self-reports of the experience or expression of anger, despite the fact that this methodology is often acknowledged as vulnerable to bias. Therefore, the present investigation examined whether a more implicit, analog assessment of frustration tolerance specifically relevant to parenting would reveal an association with various markers of elevated physical child abuse risk in a series of samples that varied with regard to age, parenting status, and abuse risk. An analog task was designed to evoke parenting-relevant frustration: the task involved completing an unsolvable task while listening to a crying baby or a toddler's temper tantrum; time scores were generated to gauge participants' persistence in the task when encountering such frustration. Across these studies, low frustration tolerance was associated with increased physical child abuse potential, greater use of parent-child aggression in discipline encounters, dysfunctional disciplinary style, support for physical discipline use and physical discipline escalation, and increased heart rate. Future research directions that could better inform intervention and prevention programs are discussed, including working to clarify the processes underlying frustration intolerance and potential interactive influences that may exacerbate physical child abuse.
尽管长期以来人们一直认为挫折会引发攻击行为，但挫折耐受力差作为儿童身体虐待风险因素的可能性却很少受到关注。相反，现有文献大多研究了愤怒在身体虐待风险中的作用，依赖于对愤怒体验或表达的自我报告，尽管这种方法通常被认为容易产生偏差。因此，本研究调查了一种更隐性的、与育儿相关的挫折耐受力模拟评估是否会揭示与一系列年龄、育儿状况和虐待风险各不相同的样本中儿童身体虐待风险升高的各种指标之间的关联。设计了一个模拟任务来引发与育儿相关的挫折感：该任务要求参与者在听着婴儿哭泣或幼儿发脾气的同时完成一项无法解决的任务；生成时间得分以衡量参与者在遇到这种挫折时在任务中的坚持程度。在这些研究中，低挫折耐受力与儿童身体虐待潜在可能性增加、在管教过程中更多地使用亲子攻击、功能失调的管教方式、对体罚使用和体罚升级的支持以及心率加快有关。讨论了可为干预和预防计划提供更好信息的未来研究方向，包括努力阐明挫折不耐受背后的过程以及可能加剧儿童身体虐待的潜在交互影响。
