Implicit measures of child abuse and neglect: A systematic review

Abstract

Interest in child maltreatment research has been growing in the last two decades. The main approach underlying this research has relied upon self and family reports. These methods may be problematic because they often require conscious awareness, generate socially desirable over accurate responses or can be biased by parents' unrealistic expectations, misattributions and perceptual errors. Simultaneously, research has been adapting methods from social cognition research in an attempt to access the implicit and spontaneous processes underlying the information processing related to parent-child interactions, exploring parental cognitions and emotions that may constitute important contributions to explain abusive and neglectful parenting.In this paper we review the research on child abuse and neglect using implicit measures. Using combinations of words related with child abuse and neglect, and with autonomic and affective variables assessed by the implicit measures, we have conducted a systematic review of 33 studies, and we examined the variables explored, the type of measures used and the results obtained.The research reviewed points out the importance of assessing parental representations in parent-child interactions and analyzing the differences between maltreating and nonmaltreating parents. Specifically, physically abusive parents tend to show more difficulties in recognizing children's emotions, reveal more biases in their perceptions and attributions about children and behave more aggressively. Further research with maltreating parents, namely neglectful, using implicit measures is still required.

Parents Who Physically Abuse: Current Status and Future Directions

“…This weakness from self-report reliance has been acknowledged for decades, raising doubts about the conclusions of countless studies. Thus, innovative assessment approaches, such as measures that rely on implicit, indirect approaches to assessment (see Camilo et al 2016), represent a promising direction to assess possible factors in a potentially more objective manner. Such indirect assessment approaches may use unconscious, implicit measurement of parents' beliefs or approaches that involve behavior simulations designed to provide insights into factors that parents would be less able to manipulate.…”

Parental Attitudes in Child Maltreatment

“…This is particularly the case for child neglect, which is the most common form of child This study also brings important methodological contributions. The combination of explicit with implicit measures circumvents some of the problems associated with the single use of questionnaires of self-report and observational methods and is likely to constitute a better approach in capturing parental cognitions (Camilo et al, 2016). Future research could also benefit from integrating experimental manipulations of parents' affective and motivational states, use more ongoing and spontaneous forms of assessing cognitions (as, for example, using video-mediated recall, open-ended interview tasks, or daily diaries), and employing different methods to capture the complexity and diversity of parental cognitions (e.g., Johnston et al, 2008).…”

Child Neglect

“…However, no single indicator is specific for neglect alone, and the child must be thoroughly evaluated to identify further indicators or co-existing or alternative causes [10]. Indicators of neglect are often best observed as manifestations of the predisposing harmful parent-child relationship, and can be divided according to the age band of the child [10,13]. Other indicators may be seen as concerns in how the child is functioning.…”