Cuidar também é pensar: Processamento cognitivo da informação em mães negligentes

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Parental attitudes in child maltreatment

Publication . Camilo, Cláudia; Garrido, M. V.; Calheros, M. M.

An information-processing approach to maladaptive parenting suggests that high-risk and maltreating parents are likely to hold inaccurate and biased preexisting cognitive schemata about child development and child rearing. Importantly, these schemas, which may include values, beliefs, expectations, and attitudes, are known to influence the way parents perceive and subsequently act toward their children. However, the few studies specifically addressing parental attitudes only considered global maltreatment, not distinguishing abuse from neglect. Moreover, few have considered dual-process models of cognition, relying mostly on the explicit level of parental attitudes that can be prone to various biases. Based on the Social Information Processing (SIP) model of child abuse and neglect, this study examines the association of parents preexisting cognitive schemata, namely explicit and implicit parental attitudes, and child abuse and neglect. A convenience sample of 201 mothers (half with at least one child referred to child protection services) completed a measure of explicit parental attitudes and a speed-accuracy task related to parenting. Abuse and neglect were measured with self-report and professionals-report instruments. Overall, the results support the hypothesis that maladaptive parenting is related with more biased preexisting cognitive schemas, namely attitudes related to parenting, but only for neglect and particularly when reported by professionals. Moreover, the results observed with both the explicit and implicit measures of attitudes were convergent, with mothers presenting more inadequate explicit attitudes also exhibiting an overall lower performance in the implicit attitudes task. This study is likely to contribute to the SIP framework of child abuse and neglect, particularly for the elucidation of the sociocognitive factors underlying maladaptive parenting, while also providing relevant cues for prevention and intervention programs.

2021Journal article

Open access

Recognizing children's emotions in child abuse and neglect

Publication . Camilo, Cláudia; Garrido, M. V.; Calheros, M. M.

Past research has suggested that parents' ability to recognize their children's emotions is associated with an enhanced quality of parent–child interactions and appropriateness of parental caregiving behavior. Although this association has also been examined in abusive and neglectful parents, the results are mixed and do not adequately address child neglect. Based on the Social Information Processing model of child abuse and neglect, we examined the association between mothers' ability to recognize children's emotions and self‐ and professionals‐reported child abuse and neglect. The ability to recognize children's emotions was assessed with an implicit valence classification task and an emotion labeling task. A convenience sample of 166 mothers (78 with at least one child referred to Child Protection Services) completed the tasks. Child abuse and neglect were measured with self‐report and professionals‐report instruments. The moderating role of mothers' intellectual functioning and socioeconomic status were also examined. Results revealed that abusive mothers performed more poorly on the negative emotions recognition task, while neglectful mothers demonstrated a lower overall ability in recognizing children's emotions. When classifying the valence of emotions, mothers who obtained higher scores on child neglect presented a higher positivity bias particularly when their scores in measures of intellectual functioning were low. There was no moderation effect for socioeconomic status. Moreover, the results for child abuse were mainly observed with self‐report measures, while for child neglect, they predominantly emerged with professionals‐report. Our findings highlight the important contribution of the social information processing model in the context of child maltreatment, with implications for prevention and intervention addressed.

2021-11-08Journal article

Open access

How does mothering look like: a multidimensional approach to maternal cognitive representations

Publication . Camilo, Cláudia; Garrido, M. V.; Ferreira, Mário B.; Calheiros, M M

From a cognitive information processing perspective, parents’ cognitive schemas strongly influence the way they perceive and act toward their children. In order to explore how maternal cognitive representations about parenting are organized in a multidimensional space, mothers referred to child protection services and mothers with no such reference completed a free description task of maternal attributes and a sorting task of those attributes according to their probability of co-occurrence in the same mother. Overall, the results suggest that maladaptive parenting seems to be associated with less positive parental schemata, higher schemata rigidity, and higher external attributions regarding parenting. Using multidimensional scaling to represent the structure and content of maternal schemata constitutes an innovative contribution to the parenting domain with potential applications. These conceptual maps representing maternal schemata that shape parental responses in child-rearing situations can be used as theoretical frameworks to develop empirically based guidelines for intervention work with maltreating parents.

2019-07-05Journal article

Open access