Childhood maltreatment -- victim to offender
Dec 21, 2012
Tragically, some who are the victims of childhood maltreatment go on to develop offending behaviour themselves. This was noted over a decade ago, by Shields and Ciccheti (1998) [LINK] who noted that being the victim of physical violence was particularly predictive of "reactive aggression" and that the pathway to such offending was often through emotion dsyregulation.. Maltreated children also evidenced attention deficits, and subclinical or nonpathological dissociation was more likely among children who had experienced physical or sexual abuse. A history of abuse also predicted emotion dysregulation, affective lability/negativity, and socially inappropriate emotion expressions. This emotion dysregulation, fostered by poor attention modulation, was a mechanism of the effects of maltreatment on reactive aggression.
A recent study by Eva Kimonis (University of South Florida) and colleagues [LINK] has again looked at this relationship, this time focusing on distinguishing between different types of juvenile psychopathy, and highlighting the role of emotion processing. In this more recent study, Kimonis et al divided a group of male serious juvenile offenders into two groups of primary and secondary variants of psychopathy depending on whether or not the individual suffered from anxiety. Results indicated that the secondary, high-anxious variant was more likely to show a history of abuse and scored higher on measures of emotional and attentional problems. On a picture version of the dot probe task, the low-anxious primary variant was not engaged by emotionally distressing pictures, whereas the high-anxious secondary variant was more attentive to such stimuli. Although the two groups differed as hypothesized from one another, neither differed significantly in their emotional processing from a nonpsychopathic control group of offending youth. These results are consistent with the possibility that the two variants of psychopathy, both of which were high on callous-unemotional (CU) traits (assessed using the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory), may have different etiological pathways, with the primary being more related to a deficit in the processing of distress cues in others and the secondary being more related to histories of abuse and emotional problems. Kimonis goes on to explore the research, and importantly (for the purposes of "Therapeutic Jurisprudence" -- which I shall be exploring in a new page on my website) and practice implications of their findings. For example, research suggests that cognitive-behavioral interventions may be most effective at treating internalizing problems (e.g., anger, anxiety, and depression) and related trauma histories that distinguish secondary variants. For the low-anxious primary variant, recent research suggests that deficits in attention to others’ distress cues can at least temporarily be corrected by focusing youths’ attention on the eye region. Also, increasing the salience of others’ distress cues has been found to attenuate laboratory-based aggression for youth scoring high on psychopathic traits. This group has also been shown to respond positively to rewards and this also can be capitalized on in treatment. For example, Hawes and Dadds (2005) reported that clinic-referred boys (ages 4 to 9) with conduct problems and CU traits were less responsive to a parenting intervention than were boys with conduct problems who were low on CU traits. However, children with and without CU traits seemed to respond equally well to the first part of the intervention that focused on teaching parents methods of using positive reinforcement to encourage prosocial behavior. In contrast, only the group without CU traits showed added improvement with the second part of the intervention that focused on teaching parents more effective discipline strategies. In summary, several promising interventions have emerged for youth with CU traits. These efforts are likely to be enhanced if they consider the heterogeneity among high CU youth and appropriately tailor treatment to their individual needs.