Elsevier

Child Abuse & Neglect

Volume 34, Issue 11, November 2010, Pages 886-895
Child Abuse & Neglect

Does accessibility of positive and negative schema vary by child physical abuse risk?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2010.05.005Get rights and content

Abstract

Objective

To examine differences in accessibility of positive and negative schema in parents with high and low risk for child physical abuse (CPA).

Methods

This study combined picture priming and lexical decision making methods to assess the accessibility of positive and negative words following presentation of child and adult faces. The child and adult faces depicted positive, ambiguous, and negative affective valences. The sample included 67 (51 low and 16 high CPA risk) general population parents.

Results

CPA risk status was associated with accessibility of positive/negative words only following priming with faces of the opposite affective valence. More specifically, high CPA risk parents were slower to respond to positive (negative) words following priming with negative (positive) faces. Exploratory analyses indicated that this pattern of findings was more clearly apparent when picture primes involved adult faces.

Conclusion

The present findings suggest that high and low CPA risk parents differ in how they process affectively incongruent information. Research is needed to further examine schema accessibility, as well as to examine whether processes involved in attention and affect integration play a role in CPA risk.

Introduction

The social information processing (SIP) model of child physical abuse (CPA) posits that the manner in which at-risk and abusive parents process information during parent–child interactions increases their risk of engaging in abusive behaviors (Milner, 1993, Milner, 2000, Milner, 2003). Among the various components of the SIP model, attributions of hostile intent have received considerable support as a cognitive factor that may help explain the occurrence of parental aggression (e.g., Azar, 1986, Bauer and Twentyman, 1985, Laurence and Twentyman, 1983, Montes et al., 2001, Springer, 2001, Valle, 1999, Mammen et al., 2002). To the extent that attributions of hostile intent play a causal role in parent to child aggression, then research examining the mechanisms that lead some parents to more frequently attribute hostile intent to their children is needed.

Studies in the general literature on aggression and information processing suggest that the roots of hostile attributional biases may lie in one or more of the basic components of information processing (e.g., perceptions, interpretations, information integration). For example, research in the general literature on aggression indicates that aggression-prone individuals have perceptual biases that favor aggression-relevant stimuli (Bargh and Pratto, 1986, Bargh and Thein, 1985). Further, highly accessible hostility-related schema have been shown to increase hostile interpretations of others (Bargh and Pietromonaco, 1982, Farc et al., 2008, Srull and Wyer, 1979, Srull and Wyer, 1980) and/or increase aggressive behavior (Carver, Ganellen, Froming, & Chambers, 1983).

Studies examining encoding patterns associated with aggression, including CPA risk, have found that aggressive individuals display a greater tendency to encode ambiguous information in hostile terms, as well as a relative lack of encoding in semantically-related (nonhostile) terms. Interestingly, the largest difference between aggressive and nonaggressive individuals appears to be in the amount of information recalled to semantic (nonhostile) cues, such that aggressive, compared to nonaggressive, participants recall significantly less information to semantic cues (Zelli, Huesmann, & Cervone, 1995). Similarly, Crouch et al. (2010) found that high CPA risk parents spontaneously encoded information related to ambiguous caregiving contexts in less positive terms. More specifically, Crouch et al. found that although total recall for hostile cues did not differ by CPA risk status; high, compared to low, CPA risk parents obtained significantly lower recall scores to positive (nonhostile) cues.

A number of questions emerge from the studies that have examined the role of hostility-related schema in CPA risk. Is the tendency to arrive at more hostile judgments of child stimuli (Farc et al., 2008) driven by both greater accessibility of hostility-related schema and the relative inaccessibility of alternative (nonhostile) schema (Crouch et al., 2010, Zelli et al., 1995)? Further, is the differential accessibility of hostile and nonhostile schema apparent only when information is ambiguous or is it also apparent when stimuli are clearly negative or clearly positive? To advance our understanding in this area, the present study was designed to assess relative accessibility of positive and negative words following presentation of faces that were positive, ambiguous, or negatively valenced with regard to emotional expression.

Another gap in the literature pertains to the question of whether differences in schema accessibility between high and low CPA risk parents are apparent for both child and adult stimuli. Zelli et al. (1995) found encoding differences between aggressive and nonaggressive respondents using vignettes that depicted characters in adult roles (e.g., policeman, secretary, etc.); however it is not clear whether these differences generalize to high versus low CPA risk parents. Crouch et al. (2010) found encoding differences between high and low CPA risk parents for sentences that depicted children behaving in an ambiguous fashion; however, differences in encoding for adult stimuli were not examined. Thus, it remains unclear whether hypothesized social information processing differences between high and low CPA risk parents are evident for adult as well as child stimuli.

Indeed, it seems probable that high CPA risk parents might evince problems in social information processing that are general in nature, impacting their ability to relate to their children as well as impairing their ability to sustain positive adult relationships. Supporting this contention are data that indicate that high CPA risk parents report more problems with family/others and more feelings of loneliness (Milner, 1986). Further, high CPA risk parents report significantly fewer relationships from which they can draw support (e.g., fewer people to help them relax when tense or to console them when very upset; Crouch, Milner, & Thomsen, 2001; see also McCurdy, 1995, Whissell et al., 1990, Zelenko et al., 2001).

Difficulties cultivating supportive relationships with adults may render high CPA risk parents less effective in coping with the stresses of parenting, and thus increase their CPA risk (for a stress and coping model of child maltreatment, see Hillson & Kuiper, 1994). Indeed, popular approaches to reducing risk of CPA include providing support (typically in the form of a home visitor or parent mentor) to high-risk parents and/or attempting to increase the parents’ connections to supportive others (Thompson, 1995). What remains unclear is why high CPA risk parents have difficulties in adult relationships and whether social information processing issues play a role in their difficulties in both child and adult relationships.

Section snippets

Study overview

This study was designed to advance our understanding of differences in schema accessibility in high and low CPA risk parents. The study design involved using a picture priming technique (modeled after that used by Fazio (1995) in his assessment of automatic attitude activation) in conjunction with a lexical decision making task to discern whether patterns of schema activation varied by type of face (child versus adult) and/or affective valence of faces (i.e., negative/ambiguous/positive) for

Participants

To recruit parents for the study, informational flyers were distributed through local agencies (e.g., daycares, churches, social service agencies). The informational flyers stated that parents would be asked to “memorize pictures of faces, complete a word task, and fill out a questionnaire,” which would take approximately 30 min and for which participants would receive $25. In an attempt to obtain an adequate number of high-risk participants, we targeted our recruitment by distributing flyers in

Response latency analyses

Results of the ANCOVA revealed that the covariate, age, was not significantly associated with response latencies (p > .05). Of the interactions involving age, only the face valence by age interaction was significant, F(2, 128) = 3.43, p < .05, with longer latencies obtained by older respondents following negative (but not ambiguous or positive) faces.

The summary table for the ANCOVA is presented in Table 2. For the sake of brevity, the effects involving the covariate (described above) are not

Discussion

Based on the SIP model of CPA and existing empirical findings, it was predicted that high CPA risk parents would evince faster responses to negative words following ambiguous and negative faces. The present study failed to provide support for this hypothesis. Further, it was expected that high CPA risk parents would respond slower to positive words following positive, ambiguous, and negative faces and the present findings provided only limited support for this prediction. More specifically,

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    This research was supported by Grant #CE000654 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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