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Poster #143 - Parents’ Experiences of Childhood Maltreatment And Their Behavioral and Autonomic Responses to Their Child.

Sat, March 23, 4:15 to 5:30pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Childhood maltreatment is associated with a wide range of negative consequences such as emotional and behavioral dysregulation in childhood (Cicchetti & Toth, 2005) and subsequent adverse mental health outcomes in adulthood (Jaffee, 2017). Experiences of childhood maltreatment have also been shown to compromise adults’ interpersonal functioning including their parenting behavior (e.g., Pears & Capaldi, 2001). However, little is known about what happens in terms of physiological regulation when parents with a history of childhood maltreatment interact with their children. Moreover, both abuse and neglect have been linked to maladjustment, yet it is still unclear whether abuse and neglect differentially impact behavioral and physiological systems (Gunnar & Quevedo, 2007).
The present study is the first to test whether childhood experiences of abuse and neglect are associated with parents’ behavioral and autonomic responses while resolving conflict with their child.
The sample consisted of 229 parents (131 women) who participated in the 3G parenting study, a family study on the intergenerational transmission of parenting styles, stress and emotion regulation. Self-reported experienced child maltreatment was measured using the Conflict Tactics Scales (for physical abuse and neglect and emotional abuse; Straus et al., 1998) and the emotional neglect subscale of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (Bernstein et al., 2003). Parents (Mage = 52.7 years, rangeage = 26.6 to 88.4 years) and their children (Mage = 24.6 years, rangeage = 7.5 to 65.6 years) participated in a videotaped parent-child conflict interaction task. Parental warmth, negativity and emotional support were coded. In addition, parents’ pre-ejection period (PEP) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) were measured as indicators of underlying sympathetic (SNS) and parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) reactivity, respectively. To evaluate autonomic reactivity, residualized change scores were calculated by regressing PEP and RSA scores during the interaction task on PEP and RSA scores during baseline. Next, a structural model using the package lavaan (Rosseel, 2012) in R (R Core Team, 2013) was computed to estimate associations between experienced abuse and neglect, parental behavior and autonomic reactivity.
The structural model of child maltreatment experiences, parental behavior and autonomic reactivity (see Figure 1) exhibited an excellent fit. Moreover, the model revealed that parents who experienced higher levels of abuse showed less warmth and more negativity, whereas parents who experienced higher levels of childhood neglect exhibited greater PNS withdrawal and SNS activation, while discussing conflict with their child.
In sum, parents who experienced more childhood abuse responded more strongly on a behavioral level but not on an autonomic level while resolving conflict, whereas the opposite pattern was observed for parents who experienced more childhood neglect. Although different types of maltreatment often co-occur (Herrenkohl & Herrenkohl, 2009), findings of the present study indicate that they do represent different experiences with rather specific outcomes. This underlines the importance of carefully assessing these two types of maltreatment and their potential outcomes, both in research and in clinical practice.

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