Cigala Ada, Mori Arianna
Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Industries (DUSIC), University of Parma, Parma, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2022 Mar 3;13:816514. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.816514. eCollection 2022.
Perspective taking is conceptualized as a multidimensional construct characterized by three components: cognitive, affective, and visual. The experience of psychological maltreatment impairs the child's emotional competence; in particular, maltreated children present difficulty in understanding and regulating emotions and in social understanding ability. In addition, the literature contains several contributions that highlight maladaptive behaviors of children with a history of maltreatment in peer interactions in the school context. Perspective taking ability has rarely been studied in maltreated children and the existing studies have produced different and often conflicting results that require further insights. On the grounds of these premises, the main objective of the present research is to investigate perspective taking ability in preschool children from maltreating and non-maltreating family contexts and its role in social adjustment, in terms of prosocial and aggressive behavior toward peers inside the kindergarten. A second objective is to verify the effectiveness of a training aimed to promote perspective taking ability in victims of psychological maltreatment. This research, organized into two separate studies, involved 249 preschool children: 206 children from non-maltreating family contexts and 43 brought up in psychologically maltreating families. Perspective taking was measured the administration of several tests, and prosocial behavior and aggressiveness were observed non-participant observations in the school context. The training involved maltreated children in small-group meetings based on familiar and appealing activities within the mother-child community. The overall results show that children's perspective taking ability, in particular the affective perspective taking, contributed to social adjustment. In fact, greater affective perspective taking ability was correlated to a higher frequency of prosocial behaviors toward peers and minor frequency of aggressiveness. Finally, the results of the training (pre/post-test comparison) showed an increase in perspective taking, especially in the affective dimension, and a consequent increase in prosocial behaviors and a decrease in aggressive ones. Therefore, the affective perspective taking ability seems to represent a very significant protective factor, which should be focused and strengthened in order to improve the social adaptation of preschool children who are victims of psychological abuse.
观点采择被概念化为一个多维结构，其具有三个组成部分：认知、情感和视觉。心理虐待的经历会损害儿童的情绪能力；特别是，受虐待儿童在理解和调节情绪以及社会理解能力方面存在困难。此外，文献中有多项研究指出，有虐待史的儿童在学校环境中的同伴互动中存在适应不良行为。在受虐待儿童中，观点采择能力很少被研究，现有研究产生了不同且往往相互矛盾的结果，需要进一步深入探讨。基于这些前提，本研究的主要目的是调查来自虐待家庭和非虐待家庭背景的学龄前儿童的观点采择能力，以及它在社会适应中的作用，即针对幼儿园内同伴的亲社会行为和攻击性行为。第二个目的是验证一项旨在提高心理虐待受害者观点采择能力的培训的有效性。本研究分为两项独立研究，涉及249名学龄前儿童：206名来自非虐待家庭背景的儿童和43名在心理虐待家庭中长大的儿童。通过进行多项测试来测量观点采择能力，并在学校环境中通过非参与观察来观察亲社会行为和攻击性。培训让受虐待儿童参加基于母婴社区中熟悉且有吸引力的活动的小组会议。总体结果表明，儿童的观点采择能力，尤其是情感观点采择能力，有助于社会适应。事实上，更强的情感观点采择能力与对同伴亲社会行为的更高频率以及更低的攻击性行为频率相关。最后，培训结果（前后测比较）显示观点采择能力有所提高，尤其是在情感维度，随之亲社会行为增加，攻击性行为减少。因此，情感观点采择能力似乎是一个非常重要的保护因素，应予以关注和强化，以改善遭受心理虐待的学龄前儿童的社会适应能力。
