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 non-maltreating 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