Milan Stephanie, Carlone Christina, Printz Destiny, Perez Sophia Dominguez
Department of Psychological Sciences, 7712University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA.
Child Maltreat. 2022 Feb;27(1):33-42. doi: 10.1177/1077559520972188. Epub 2020 Nov 11.
Experiencing maltreatment in childhood can have a lasting impact on how individuals identify and understand emotions in others. Research in this area has not examined parents' understanding of children's emotions, although emotion processing deficits may be one mechanism linking childhood maltreatment to subsequent parenting problems. In a matched case-control design, we test whether mothers with ( = 50) and without ( = 96) childhood maltreatment differ in their understanding of children's emotions on self-report measures and computer-based tasks. Compared to the control group, mothers who experienced maltreatment labeled more children with sad or angry emotions when given limited facial information and made different interpersonal inferences about children they labeled angry. They also reported more subjective difficulty interpreting emotions in unknown children and their own child. Results provide further evidence of emotion processing biases associated with childhood maltreatment. Interventions aimed at improving parental emotion understanding and mentalization may be particularly useful for mothers with a history of childhood maltreatment.
童年经历虐待会对个体识别和理解他人情绪的方式产生持久影响。该领域的研究尚未考察父母对孩子情绪的理解，尽管情绪处理缺陷可能是将童年虐待与后续育儿问题联系起来的一种机制。在一项匹配病例对照设计中，我们测试了有（n = 50）和没有（n = 96）童年虐待经历的母亲在自我报告测量和基于计算机的任务中对孩子情绪的理解是否存在差异。与对照组相比，有虐待经历的母亲在获得有限面部信息时，将更多孩子的情绪标记为悲伤或愤怒，并对她们标记为愤怒的孩子做出了不同的人际推断。她们还报告说，在解读陌生孩子和自己孩子的情绪时主观上更困难。研究结果为与童年虐待相关的情绪处理偏差提供了进一步证据。旨在提高父母情绪理解和心理化能力的干预措施可能对有童年虐待史的母亲特别有用。
