Poster #123 - Risk of Childhood Maltreatment and the Association Between Maternal and Child Empathy

• In Event: 1-061 - Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

Introduction. Childhood maltreatment (CM), defined as severe acts of abuse and neglect towards children, is a major public-health concern, as it is a widespread phenomenon. Sadly, in most instances the abusers are the parents (Finkelhor, Turner et al. 2015). Early exposure to maltreatment is associated with destructive short and long-term effects on physical and psychological well-being for most children, including unadaptive emotion regulation, impairment in the ability to learn the social and interpersonal skills needed to successfully engage in adult relationships, antisocial behaviors and a tendency to be socially withdrawn (Cicchetti & Toth, 2005). These difficulties may be the result of specific deficits in cognitive and emotional empathy. Cognitive empathy is defined as the ability to recognize and understand other's emotions; emotional empathy is defined as the ability to share in the emotions of others while maintaining a self-other distinction (Uzefovsky & Knafo-Noam, 2016). The current study examined two main questions: (1) is mother’s abuse risk (potential risk to be abusive toward their child) related to cognitive and/or emotional empathy in the child? (2) how does abuse risk mediate the association between maternal and child empathy?
Methods. To answer these questions, we recruited 462 mothers of 4-10 years old (48% girls; M= 6.51±18.86) through an online platform (Prolific inc.). Mothers were asked to report their own cognitive and emotional empathy (IRI; Davis, 1983), views related to abuse risk (B-CAP; Ondersma, chaffin et al. 2005), and their child's cognitive and emotional empathy (GEM; Dadds, Hunter et al. 2008). The data was analyzed using model 4 in PROCESS v3.1 (Hayes, 2013), with maternal empathy scales as predictors, abuse risk as a mediator and child's cognitive/emotional empathy as dependent measures in two different analyses.
The participating mothers come from varied background (Figure 1), 44% of mothers do not work, 32% described their socioeconomic status as below/a lot below average. Mother’s education level was varied, with 82.2% mothers possessing at least some higher education.
Results Findings show that child's cognitive empathy is predicted by maternal empathic concern (EC), perspective taking (PT) and personal distress (PD). The association of PT and PD with child's cognitive empathy is mediated by abuse risk. Conversely, maternal empathy, and specifically, EC, PD and the fantasy scale, is directly associated with child's emotional empathy (no mediation through abuse risk; models presented in Figure 2).
Conclusions. These findings help clarify the complex links between maternal empathy, abuse risk, and child's empathy, showing that maternal views related to abuse are specifically predictive of child's cognitive but not emotional empathy. As such, these findings raise further questions regarding the mechanism by which maternal characteristics and behavior are associated with child's empathy.

Authors

• Adi Meidan, Ben-Gurion University
  Presenting Author

• Florina Uzefovsky, Ben Gurion University
  Non-Presenting Author