Category: Anger Management

Journal Reference:

1. E. C. Wells. "But Most of All, They Fought Together": Judicial Attributions for Sentences in Convicting Battered Women Who Kill. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 2012; 36 (3): 350 DOI: 

While difficult to pinpoint, it may be the most challenging and prevalent form of child abuse and neglect, experts say in an American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) position statement on psychological maltreatment in the August issue of the journal Pediatrics.

Psychological abuse includes acts such as belittling, denigrating, terrorizing, exploiting, emotional unresponsiveness, or corrupting a child to the point a child's well-being is at risk, said Dr. Harriet MacMillan, a professor in the departments of psychiatry and behavioural neurosciences and pediatrics of McMaster University's Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine and the Offord Centre for Child Studies. One of three authors of the position statement, she holds the David R. (Dan) Offord Chair in Child Studies at McMaster.

"We are talking about extremes and the likelihood of harm, or risk of harm, resulting from the kinds of behavior that make a child feel worthless, unloved or unwanted," she said, giving the example of a mother leaving her infant alone in a crib all day or a father involving his teenager in his drug habit.

A parent raising their voice to a strident pitch after asking a child for the eighth time to put on their running shoes is not psychological abuse, MacMillan said. "But, yelling at a child every day and giving the message that the child is a terrible person, and that the parent regrets bringing the child into this world, is an example of a potentially very harmful form of interaction."

Psychological abuse was described in the scientific literature more than 25 years ago, but it has been under-recognized and under-reported, MacMillan said, adding that its effects "can be as harmful as other types of maltreatment."

The report says that because psychological maltreatment interferes with a child's development path, the abuse has been linked with disorders of attachment, developmental and educational problems, socialization problems and disruptive behaviour. "The effects of psychological maltreatment during the first three years of life can be particularly profound."

This form of mistreatment can occur in many types of families, but is more common in homes with multiple stresses, including family conflict, mental health issues, physical violence, depression or substance abuse.

Although there are few studies reporting the prevalence of psychological abuse, the position statement says large population-based, self-report studies in Britain and the United States found approximately eight-to-nine per cent of women and four per cent of men reported exposure to severe psychological abuse during childhood.

The statement says pediatricians need to be alert to the possibility of psychological abuse even though there is little evidence on potential strategies that might help. It suggests collaboration among pediatric, psychiatric and child protective service professionals is essential for helping the child at risk.

Funders for the paper's development included the Family Violence Prevention Unit of the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Along with MacMillan, the statement was prepared by Indiana pediatrician Dr. Roberta Hibbard, an expert on child abuse and neglect; Jane Barlow, professor of Public Health in the Early Years at the University of Warwick; as well as the Committee on Child Abuse and Neglect and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Child Maltreatment and Violence Committee.

"There is a lot of research that studies the victim of intimate partner violence, but not the perpetrator," said Julia Babcock, an associate professor in the department of psychology and co-director of the Center for Couples Therapy, a clinical research center at UH that offers therapy for couples. "The predominant model for IPV intervention is based on what was gleaned from women in battered women shelters and focuses on men's patriarchal attitudes about power and control. Since most domestic violence occurs in the context of an argument, the experiment I conducted evaluated whether I could change how the communication goes during an argument with the batterer and his partner. The findings indicated the batterers could learn communications skills and when they applied them in an argument with their female partners, the argument improved and the participants felt better about the argument and more understood."

Babcock notes this research is significant in that it breaks new ground in applying experiments to domestic violence and may improve batterers' intervention programs. In a review of the research studies on the efficacy of batterers' intervention programs, Babcock found the results disappointing. There was a small change when a perpetrator completed a batterers intervention program and only a 5 percent reduction rate in repeat offenses. "There is definitely a need to improve batterers' intervention programs, since research suggests that they're largely ineffective, but frequently prescribed by courts as a remedy for convicted IPV perpetrators," said Babcock. Babcock's research focuses on male batterers because men are the perpetrators in about 85 percent of the abuse cases, and women are 10 times more likely to be murdered by an intimate than are men.

By listing an advertisement in local papers that said, "couples experiencing conflict," the research team recruited 120 couples in the Houston area qualified for the experiment. Candidates for the study were screened over the telephone to make sure they met criteria. To meet the criteria to participate in the study, two acts of violence had to occur in the last year that might include: pushing, shoving, choking, using a weapon or a beating. If there was no physical abuse, but the couple scored low for marital satisfaction, Babcock included them as a comparison group.

The couples were then invited to participate in an experiment in the "Emotions in Marriage Lab," where the research team observed a couple in a 15-minute argument. Both male and female partner were connected to monitors to measure heart rate, respiration, skin conductance, movement, pulse, transit time of blood flow from the periphery to the heart, skin temperature while affect (such as anger, contempt, fear, disgust, etc.) was noted. Midway during the 15-minute argument, the researchers interrupted the argument at 7½ minutes and randomly assigned the male batterer to one of three conditions: 1) a time out; 2) a request to edit out the negative, where he makes the same points in a more neutral fashion; or, 3) a request to accept influence, where he listens to the female's ideas, trusts that the partner may be right and validates her idea even if his idea is different. The male batterer was taught these communication skills then asked to use them in the second half of the argument.

"What we found is that the interventions worked to make the second half of the argument better," said Babcock. "Batterers could learn these communication skills and when they applied them in arguments with their female partner, it decreased aggressive attacks on the female partner, contemptuous behavior, criticism and put downs in both the woman and the man. The idea is that reducing such psychological abuse may reduce intimate partner violence. Whereas most therapies are built top down from theory, the new technology allows us to build a therapy package–technique by technique–from the lab up."

Babcock's article based on this UH experiment, "A Proximal Change Experiment Testing Two Communication Exercises with Intimate Partner Violent Men," won the "Best of 2011 Violence Research" award for the most exemplary research being conducted on violence and aggression. Five senior researchers convened by the Psychology of Violence Journal selected articles they believe have the potential to advance the field and direct the future research on violence.

"Claims by the media and researchers that cyberbullying has increased dramatically and is now the big school bullying problem are largely exaggerated," said psychologist Dan Olweus, PhD, of the University of Bergen, Norway. "There is very little scientific support to show that cyberbullying has increased over the past five to six years, and this form of bullying is actually a less frequent phenomenon."

APA presented Olweus at the convention with its 2012 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy for his 40 years of research and intervention in the area of bullying among youth.

To demonstrate that cyberbullying is less frequent than "traditional" bullying, Olweus cited several large-scale studies he conducted, including one involving approximately 450,000 U.S. students in grades three to 12. In the latter, regular surveys were conducted in connection with the introduction of Olweus's bullying prevention program in 1,349 schools from 2007 to 2010. Another study followed 9,000 students in grades four through 10 in 41 schools in Oslo, Norway, from 2006 to 2010.

In the U.S. sample, an average of 18 percent of students said they had been verbally bullied, while about 5 percent said they had been cyberbullied. About 10 percent said they had bullied others verbally and 3 percent said they had cyberbullied others. Similarly, in the Norwegian sample, 11 percent said they had been verbally bullied, 4 percent reported being the victim of cyberbullying, 4 percent said they had verbally bullied others and 1 percent said they had cyberbullied others.

Other analyses showed that 80 percent to 90 percent of cyberbullied students were also exposed to traditional forms of bullying — that is, they were bullied verbally, physically or in more indirect, relational ways, such as being the subject of false, mean rumors. Similarly, most cyberbullies also bullied in more traditional ways.

All students filled out the Olweus Bullying Questionnaire, which asks extensive questions about an individual's experience with bullying, both as a victim and a perpetrator. The survey includes questions about the students' experience with cyberbullying, which is defined as taking place via a mobile phone or the Internet.

"These results suggest that the new electronic media have actually created few 'new' victims and bullies," Olweus said. "To be cyberbullied or to cyberbully other students seems to a large extent to be part of a general pattern of bullying where use of electronic media is only one possible form, and, in addition, a form with low prevalence."

This is not to say that cyberbullying cannot be a problem in schools and outside of school, Olweus noted. Cyberbullied children, like targets of more traditional bullying, often suffer from depression, poor self-esteem, anxiety and even suicidal thoughts, he said.

"However, it is difficult to know to what extent these problems actually are a consequence of cyberbullying itself. As we've found, this is because the great majority of cyberbullied children and youth are also bullied in traditional ways, and it is well documented that victims of traditional bullying suffer from the bad treatment they receive," he said. "Nonetheless, there are some forms of cyberbullying — such as having painful or embarrassing pictures or videos posted — which almost certainly have negative effects. It is therefore important also to take cyberbullying seriously both in research and prevention."

Olweus recommends that schools and communities invest time and technical efforts in anonymously disclosing identified cases of cyberbullying — and then communicating clearly and openly the results to the students. This strategy can substantially increase the perceived risk of disclosure and is likely to reduce further the already low prevalence of cyberbullying, he said.

"Given that traditional bullying is much more prevalent than cyberbullying, it is natural to recommend schools to direct most of their efforts to counteracting traditional bullying. I don't want to trivialize or downplay cyberbullying but I definitely think it is necessary and beneficial to place cyberbullying in proper context and to have a more realistic picture of its prevalence and nature," he said.

So what explains older adults' positive mood regulation?

In a new article in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researcher Derek Isaacowitz of Northeastern University explores positive looking as one possible explanation: older adults may be better at regulating emotion because they tend to direct their eyes away from negative material or toward positive material.

Isaacowitz presents evidence indicating that, compared to younger adults, older adults prefer positive looking patterns and they show the most positive looking when they are in bad moods, even though this is when younger adults show the most negative looking.

Research conducted by Isaacowitz and colleagues indicates that there is actually a causal relationship between positive looking and mood: for adults with good attentional abilities, positive looking patterns can help to regulate their mood.

Although older adults prefer to focus on positive stimuli, the research shows that they aren't necessarily missing any salient or important information.

Humans have evolved a genetically-controlled drive to help weaker individuals fight back against a bully. The drive to help the weaker group members led to a dramatic reduction in group inequality and eventually enabled humans to develop widespread cooperation, empathy, compassion and egalitarian moral values, according to the paper which appears August 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings appear to support prior research showing that more egalitarian societies, such as in Scandinavian countries, appear to keep bullying in check. In one of the earliest cross-national studies on bullying in schools by professor Dan Olweus, who pioneered anti-bullying programs worldwide beginning in the early 1980s, the behavior was found to occur at lower rates in Denmark, Sweden and Norway. These findings are supported by additional, more recent studies by the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization.

Using a mathematical model, the paper's author Sergey Gavrilets showed that differences in fighting abilities cause hierarchies to emerge where stronger individuals take away resources from weaker individuals. However, when individuals realize greater benefits can occur if they prevent the transfer of resources from weaker individuals, a particular, genetically controlled psychology evolves that causes individuals to intervene on behalf of the victim. While intervening carries some risk, the helping pays off in the long term, ensuring that everyone's resources remain equal, Gavrilets finds. "Based on the results, helping the victim then is the evolutionary 'right' thing to do, not only from a victim's point of view or a societal point of view but also the helper's point of view. As such, I'd speculate that this is also a psychologically rewarding thing to do in spite of the risks potentially involved," said Gavrilets, who is the Associate Director for Scientific Activities at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis and a professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

With almost one in five U.S. students reporting having been bullied sometimes or more often and a recent spate of teen suicides linked to bullying, the Obama administration has vowed to make anti-bullying a national priority and has endorsed the national ad campaign.

Journal Reference:

1. S. Fazel, J. P. Singh, H. Doll, M. Grann. Use of risk assessment instruments to predict violence and antisocial behaviour in 73 samples involving 24 827 people: systematic review and meta-analysis. BMJ, 2012; 345 (jul24 2): e4692 DOI: 10.1136/bmj.e4692