0000000000142791
AUTHOR
M. Angeles Cerezo
Childhood Victimization by Adults and Peers and Health-Risk Behaviors in Adulthood
AbstractVictimization experienced in childhood has been linked with health-risk behaviors (HRBs) in adulthood. The purpose of this cross-sectional survey was to provide data regarding the HRBs using the ISPCAN Child Abuse Screening Tool Retrospective version (ICAST-R), Spanish version. This aimed to broaden existing knowledge by assessing both being victimized by adults and by peers in a Spanish general population of 348, aged 18–35. Age and timing of the reported victimization were also considered. Victimization: physical, psychological, sexual abuse by adults and/or peers showed a prevalence of 44.54%. Of these, 41.29% reported abuse by both. Children victimized by adults, regardless of t…
Ecosystem Adversity as Setting Factors in Mothers' Judgment of Child Behavior and Indiscriminate Mothering
Several studies have shown that troubled mothers are not accurate observers of their children's behavior. These mothers have a global and usually blame-oriented reporting style coloured by disphoric views of social isolation, social coercion and socioeconomic disadvantage. The dsyphoric view describes a number of contextual or setting factors that seem to influence a mother's observational reports about her child more than the child's actual behavior does. Of course, when this observational bias exists, the mother's parenting performance is bound to be comprised. According to the considerations above, this study was designed with a group of 21 mother-child dyads characterized by their coer…
Sequential analyses in coercive mother-child interaction: the predictability hypothesis in abusive versus nonabusive dyads.
Abstract Objective: A two-fold purpose guided the present study: 1) To test the sequential relationship between the child’s aversive behavior and both the predictability and the compliance episodes, as well as the sequential relationship between these two mothering episodes proposed by the new predictability hypothesis (Wahler, Williams, & Cerezo, 1990) ; 2) to explore whether or not these patterns are specific to these dysfunctional dyads by using a nonabusive comparison group. Method: Fifty mother-child dyads, 25 abusive and 25 nonabusive, participated in this study. Lag sequential analyses were carried out on 302 hours of direct observation, 178 hours in the abusive group, and 124 in the…
Maternal inconsistent socialization: An interactional pattern with maltreated children
Most child abuse episodes take place in the context of child-rearing conflicts. Parents show a lack of competence in appropriately solving these conflicts, producing an escalating phenomenon which eventually ends in verbal and/or physical aggression towards the child. The main purpose of this study is to test the role of inconsistent socialization in the development of prolonged dyadic coercive exchanges. Observational information from 15 mother-child dyads referred for psychological treatment for abuse and 15 non-clinical dyads was obtained at home. Results show the mother's indiscriminate attention following prosocial child behaviour was significantly higher in abusive dyads, while disrup…
Instruments to measure interaction of mothers and newborns: A systematic review
Interactions between newborns and their parents/primary caregivers are characterized by asymmetric and dependent relationships. This systematic review mapped, identified, and described the psychometric parameters, categories, and items of instruments used to assess mother-newborn interaction. Seven electronic databases were accessed in this study. Furthermore, this research included neonatal interaction studies describing instruments' items, domains, and psychometric properties while excluding studies that focused on maternal interactions and lacked items for assessing newborns. Additionally, studies validated with older infants that did not have a newborn in the sample were used for test v…
Mother-infant interaction and children's socio-emotional development with high- and low-risk mothers.
Charting the dynamic character of mother-infant interaction requires using observational systems of sequential coding in real time. A longitudinal study was designed to approach maternal sensitivity in a more complex way using sequential analysis. The study was conducted with 20 high- and 20 low-risk mothers and their infants (aged: 3, 12 and 15 months) to examine the relation among mothers' risk status for physical abuse and their maternal interactive profiles, using micro-social sequential analyses, and the subsequent quality of attachment developed by their children at 15 months of age. Results showed significantly different timings in maternal responses in high- and low-risk groups, tha…
Parental and Infant Gender Factors in Parent-Infant Interaction: State-Space Dynamic Analysis.
This study aimed to investigate the influence of parental gender on their interaction with their infants, considering, as well, the role of the infant’s gender. The State Space Grid (SSG) method, a graphical tool based on the non-linear dynamic system (NDS) approach was used to analyze the interaction, in Free-Play setting, of 52 infants, aged 6 to 10 months, divided into two groups: half of the infants interacted with their fathers and half with their mothers. There were 50% boys in each group. MANOVA results showed no differential parenting of boys and girls. Additionally, mothers and fathers showed no differences in the Diversity of behavioral dyadic states nor in Predictability. However…
Supporting parenting of infants: evaluating outcomes for parents and children in a community-based program.
This research presents an evaluation of the intervention dose-effect of the Parent-Child Psychological Support Program (PCPS). The PCPS is a universal community-based program to support parenting, during the first 18 months, and to promote protective adaptive systems in children through a schedule of quarterly office-based appointments, starting at 3 months of age. Generally children attend for six visits. When the Program opens in a particular area, parents of all children under 18 months are invited. The different ages of the children who are joining present a unique opportunity to obtain groups to evaluate the program dose-effect using a cohort-sequential design. This dose-effect on pare…
Mother-child interactional patterns in high-and low-risk mothers
Abstract Objective: The aim of the present study was to determine the extent to which mother-child interactional patterns in high-and low-risk (for child physical abuse) mothers were similar to patterns observed in physically abusive parents. Method: Ten high-risk and 10 demographically similar low-risk mother-child dyads were studied. Trained observers coded maternal-child interaction patterns in the home during five 1-hour periods using the Standardized Observation Codes system. Results: As expected, high-risk mothers made fewer neutral approaches to their children, displayed more negative behaviors toward their children, and made more indiscriminant responses to their children's prosocia…
The temporal dimension in the understanding of maternal sensitivity in caregiver-infant interactions: The 'Early Mother-Child Interaction Coding System'.
Abstract Caregiver-child interaction is known to play a central role in children’s socioemotional development, yet the diversity of measures commonly used to evaluate it call into question the nature of the construct being assessed. Contingency within caregiver-child interactions has been identified as a key dyadic process that requires taking a temporal perspective to evaluating interactions. The Early Mother-Child Interaction Coding System is a psychometrically sound measure that sequentially code the flow of interactive and non-interactive behaviours within a caregiver-infant system. Its use of the framework of nonlinear dynamical systems (NDS) expands our understanding of contingent car…
The mothering of conduct problem and normal children in Spain and the USA: authoritarian and permissive asynchrony.
Ninety-two clinic-referred and nonclinical mother-child dyads in Spain and the USA were observed in their home settings under naturalistic conditions for a total of 477 hours. Children in the clinic-referred dyads were considered troubled because of conduct problems. The observations were aimed at assessing two forms of mother-child asynchrony, either of which was expected to differentiate clinic referred from nonclinical dyads. Authoritarian asynchrony was defined as a mother's indiscriminate use of aversive reactions to her child, whereas the permissive form entailed indiscriminate positive reactions. Results showed the American mothers to generate more permissive asynchrony, whereas the …
The mediating role of self-compassion in the relationship between victimization and psychological maladjustment in a sample of adolescents.
The objectives of the present study were to analyze the relationship between victimization and psychological maladjustment in adolescents and the role of self-compassion as a mediator in this relationship. The sample was composed of 109 adolescents aged from 15 to 18 years old with poor school performance. The participants filled out a battery of questionnaires made up of: a socio-demographic data questionnaire; the Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire (JVQ); the Youth Self-Report (YSR); and the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS). RESULTS indicated that victimization was positively associated with psychological maladjustment. Moreover, adolescents reporting poly-victimization showed significantly …
Emotional and cognitive adjustment in abused children
Research on the impact of maltreatment on children has increased in the last years, as there is a need to design appropriate treatment strategies. Social, cognitive, and emotional areas may be affected in these children. This research is aimed to study the psychological functioning of child victims, particularly in their emotional and cognitive adjustment. Nineteen children (10.3 years old) with case histories of at least 2 years of physical and emotional parental abuse and a group of 26 nonmaltreated children (9.4 years old) matched in socio-economic characteristics and coming from the same community area were compared in depressive symptomatology and attributional style by using the stand…
Modifying the family process in two cases of physical child abuse and secondary functional encopresis
In this article, a treatment working model is proposed and applied to two cases of multiproblem families with severe physical child abuse. Stimulus events that directly affect the likelihood of a physically abusive episode and setting factors that play an important indirect role because they increase the number of confrontations and decrease parental competence are considered. The child abuse cases involved major parenting deficits, maternal psychopathology, a major psychosomatic problem (childhood encopresis), and symptoms of childhood conduct disorder, which occurred in a setting of family distress, low income, and sibling distress. This study demonstrates how a two-phase comprehensive p…
Improving child maltreatment detection systems: a large-scale case study involving health, social services, and school professionals.
Abstract Objectives: The purpose of this 5-year study was to improve detection in two consecutive phases: (a) To close the gap between the number of identified cases and the actual number of cases of child abuse by increasing detection; and (b) To increase the possibility of a broader spectrum of detection. Method: The Balearic Islands (one of the Autonomous Communities of Spain, with 161,287 children under 18 years old) was selected as the study area. Phase 1: front-line professionals (181) from all the health and social services agencies were trained in detection. Phase 2, school professionals (251) from all schools in the territory were also trained. The independent factor was the interv…
La Cualidad del apego infantil y sensibilidad materna desde la perspectiva microsofial [The quality of attachment in childhood and maternal sensivity: from observation of behaviours to exploration of mental representations]
Research in the area of early mother-child interaction and the development of attachment, points to the importance of advancing the study of the maternal sensitivity construct. In this pa per we describe the process followed to opera cionalise and analyze “maternal sensitivity” us ing microsocial approach. This approach can reveal empirical sequential patterns in the in teractional dyadic context that cannot be cap tured with rating scales. To describe the re search process used, this paper presents: the CITMI-R ( Codigos de Interaccion Temprana Materno-Infantil , Early Mother ‐Child Interac tion Codes) coding system and its developments, some relevant findings using sequential analyses in …
Theoretical and Empirical Underpinnings of Maternal Sensitivity: Considerations of Sensitivity Across Cultures and Socioeconomic Status
This chapter presents a comprehensive overview of maternal sensitivity and its predictors, along with the assumptions that explain its repercussions on child development and evidence of these relations. We first present the conceptual and operational definitions of maternal sensitivity espoused by Attachment Theory. Next, we summarize predictors of maternal sensitivity, emphasizing how maternal mental health issues and economic vulnerability can hinder mothers’ ability to sensitively respond to their infants. Finally, we discuss longitudinal studies and meta-analyses which show how maternal sensitivity predicts numerous domains of child development.