Managing emotion in a maltreating context: A pilot study examining child neglect☆
Introduction
Considerable recent attention has been directed toward understanding the development of emotion management skills and the importance of these skills to children's psychosocial functioning (Barrett & Campos, 1987; Gross, 1998, Parke et al., 1992; Saarni, Mumme, & Campos, 1998). Research in this area has focused primarily on skills within three emotion management categories: (a) encoding and decoding of emotions, which involves the ability to recognize emotional expressions of others and to produce clear, appropriate emotional displays; (b) emotional understanding, which involves understanding the causes and consequences of emotional expression as well as appropriate responses to emotional displays of others; and (c) emotion regulation, which involves the ability to regulate emotional expression and emotional experience. According to functionalist theory (Barrett & Campos, 1987; Saarni et al., 1998), these skills are fundamental to emotional competence because they enable children to apply their knowledge about emotion strategically when responding to emotionally arousing situations, facilitating their adaptation to the social environment. As such, deficits in emotion management skills may place children at risk for other adaptational failures in development (e.g., poor peer relations, psychopathology). Consistent with these theoretical tenets, skills within these emotion management categories have been demonstrated to relate to social competence and psychological health (Cook, Greenberg, & Kusche, 1994; Denham, McKinley, Couchoud, & Holt, 1990; Denham et al., 2001, Eisenberg et al., 2001, Fabes et al., 2001; Rogosch, Cicchetti, & Aber, 1995; Shipman, Schneider, & Brown, 2004).
Few studies have examined the development of emotion management skills in children whose life experiences disrupt the normal course of emotional development. In particular, within the child neglect literature (see Erickson & Egeland for review, 1996), researchers have focused on the psychosocial outcomes of neglect (e.g., psychopathology, poor peer relations), with little attention to the developmental processes that may underlie these outcomes. This is surprising given that research suggests that children who experience neglect are at risk for psychosocial difficulties characterized by emotion dysregulation. In particular, research indicates that neglected children are at risk for internalizing and externalizing behavioral problems (e.g., depression, aggressive behavior) and peer rejection (Erickson & Egeland, 1996; Erickson, Egeland, & Pianta, 1989; Gaudin, Polansky, & Kilpatrick, 1993). Further, neglectful parents lack a number of characteristics thought to be important to the development of emotion management skills. In particular, neglectful mothers provide less support and acknowledgement of their children, show lower levels of emotional expression in the parent-child relationship, and provide little exchange of emotional information (Aragona & Eyeberg, 1981; Bousha & Twentyman, 1984; Crittenden, 1981, Gaudin et al., 1996). In addition, related research investigating physical and sexual abuse has demonstrated that maltreating parents socialize emotion management skills differently than nonmaltreating parents (e.g., provide less support in response to children's emotion, engage in less emotion-related discussion) and that maltreated children show deficits in skills across all three emotion management categories (Camras, Sachs-Alter, & Ribordy, 1996; Shipman and Zeman, 1999, Shipman and Zeman, 2001; Shipman, Zeman, Penza, & Champion, 2000). Increased understanding of the impact of neglect on emotional development is essential given that neglect is the most common form of child maltreatment, with 552,000 children estimated to experience neglect each year (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2002).
Taken together, this research suggests that neglected children are at risk for psychosocial difficulties characterized by emotion dysregulation and that they develop in a context that is likely to interfere with competent emotional development. To date, however, little research has examined the ways in which neglect may interfere with normative emotional development. Research in this area will help identify processes that underlie neglected children's risk for adaptational failures in development. For example, emotional understanding skills may facilitate children's ability to establish and maintain constructive peer relationships whereas deficits in emotional understanding may place them at risk for peer rejection. Identifying processes in emotional development that may underlie neglected children's risk for negative outcomes will facilitate the development of prevention and intervention programs for neglected children and their families by targeting skills essential to children's socioemotional competence and psychological adjustment.
To date, there has been little research that investigates emotion management skills in children who have experienced neglect. One available study (Pollak, Cicchetti, Hornung, & Reed, 2000) examined neglected children's ability to decode facial expression in others as compared to a nonmaltreated control group. Inclusionary criteria for the neglect group required that children had experienced physical neglect (i.e., the child's minimum physical needs were not met) with no history of physical or sexual abuse. Findings indicated that neglected children demonstrated difficulty identifying facial expressions of negative emotion as well as a response bias in which they tended to misidentify facial expressions of other negative emotions as expressions of sadness. Related research has examined the impact of child maltreatment on emotional development more broadly by including samples of children who experienced different types of maltreatment (e.g., emotional, physical, sexual abuse, and/or neglect). Findings from these studies suggest that maltreated children demonstrate difficulties in the recognition and production of emotional expression (Camras et al., 1996), difficulties identifying situational causes of emotion (Rogosh et al., 1995), and emotion dysregulation (Shields & Cicchetti, 1997). Although these studies provide helpful information, it is not possible to separate the effect of neglect from other types of maltreatment given that the samples included children with different types of maltreatment experiences. Separation of maltreatment type is important given that the quality of the maltreating environment differs in significant ways for abused as compared to neglected children. Neglect involves acts of omission (e.g., lack of parental involvement, inadequate care) whereas physical abuse involves acts of commission (e.g., hostility and aggression directed at the child). As such, neglectful parents are unlikely to provide the support and scaffolding necessary to facilitate their children's emotional development.
The present study, investigated emotion management skills in children who had experienced physical neglect in order to determine how developing within a neglectful context may interfere with competent emotional development. In particular, this study examined emotional understanding and emotion regulation skills in children as a function of maltreatment status (i.e., neglect, control) and type of emotion (i.e., anger, sadness). Anger and sadness were included because these emotions are commonly experienced in childhood and, when managed appropriately, are thought to facilitate children's adaptation to their social environment by helping them effectively manage daily social interactions (e.g., resolving conflict with parent or peer for anger, obtaining support for sadness). In addition, each of these emotions is posited to serve a unique function for the child (e.g., overcoming an obstacle to goal attainment for anger, eliciting support or assistance for sadness). In turn, they are expected to result in a different response from the child's social partner. Normative research has demonstrated that different socialization histories exist for anger and sadness and that children's expectancies regarding the interpersonal outcomes of their emotional expression vary by type of emotion (Casey & Fuller, 1994; Jenkins & Ball, 2000; Zeman & Shipman, 1996).
Based on functionalist tenets and a review of the empirical literature, a set of hypotheses was developed. With regard to emotional understanding, normative research indicates the importance of parental discussion of emotion and parental support in response to the child's emotion (Denham, 1998). Given the nature of the neglectful environment (e.g., parental unavailability to facilitate emotional discussion and provide support and assistance; Erickson & Egeland, 1996), we hypothesized that neglected children would demonstrate lower levels of emotional understanding than their nonmaltreated peers. With regard to emotion regulation, normative research suggests the importance of parental scaffolding (e.g., support in regulating emotional arousal) in the development of adaptive emotion regulation skills (Saarni, 1999, Thompson, 1994). In addition, research suggests that neglected children are at risk for self-regulatory difficulties (e.g., behavioral problems) (Egeland, Sroufe, & Erickson, 1983; Erickson & Egeland, 1996; Reidy, 1977). Therefore, we hypothesized that neglected children, as compared to their nonmaltreated peers, would demonstrate fewer adaptive strategies for managing emotional arousal and higher levels of emotion dysregulation. In addition, we hypothesized that neglected children would expect to receive less support and more conflict from their mothers in response to emotional displays and would be less likely to show their emotion to their mothers. Finally, type of emotion (i.e., anger, sadness) was considered given normative research that suggests that children's emotion management strategies vary as a function of the type of emotion experienced (e.g., Zeman & Shipman, 1996).
Section snippets
Participants
Twenty-four neglected children between 6 and 12 years of age (M age = 9 years, 3 month, SD = 2 years) and their mothers were recruited from a parenting program for maltreating parents provided by a mental health agency that was independent of Children's Protective Services (CPS). Participants were recruited during the orientation phase of the parenting program to avoid potential treatment confounds. Inclusionary criteria for the neglect group required that the child had experienced physical neglect
Emotional Understanding Interview (EUI)
A main effect emerged for group, F(1, 46) = 5.57, p < .05, in which neglected children had significantly lower emotional understanding scores than non-maltreated children. This finding indicates that neglected children demonstrated more difficulty understanding emotion (e.g., causes and consequences of emotion, appropriate response to emotions in others) than non-maltreated children. There were no differences as a function of emotion type and no significant interaction between group status and
Discussion
The present study examined emotional understanding and emotion regulation skills in neglected and nonneglected children. In general, findings demonstrated that neglected children have lower levels of emotional understanding, fewer adaptive emotion regulation skills, and less effective coping strategies than their nonmaltreated peers. Further, neglected children expect less support and more conflict from their mothers in response to emotional displays and are more likely to dissemble emotional
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2022, Child Abuse and NeglectCitation Excerpt :The associations of CEA and CN with lower levels of empathy are consistent with research demonstrating robust negative associations between these experiences and emotion competence broadly. In particular, CEA has been found to predict reduced emotional awareness (Berzenski & Yates, 2010; Kapeleris & Paivio, 2011) and CN has been consistently associated with lower levels of emotion knowledge (Pollak et al., 2000; Shipman et al., 2005). Given that awareness and understanding of emotions are critical substrates of the more complex capability of empathy, it is not surprising that CEA and CN emerged as barriers to empathy development in this study.
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The first author was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (1R03 MH60281–01A1) in the completion of this project.