The following
prospective longitudinal study considers the ways that protracted exposure to
verbal and physical aggression between parents may take a substantial toll on
emotional adjustment for 1,025 children followed from 6 to 58 months of age.
Exposure to chronic poverty from infancy to early childhood as well as multiple
measures of household chaos were also included as predictors of children’s
ability to recognize and modulate negative emotions in order to disentangle the
role of interparental conflict from the socioeconomic forces that sometimes
accompany it. Analyses revealed that exposure to greater levels of
interparental conflict, more chaos in the household, and a higher number of
years in poverty can be empirically distinguished as key contributors to
58-month-olds’ ability to recognize and modulate negative emotion. Implications
for models of experiential canalization of emotional processes within the
context of adversity are discussed.
Protracted exposure to verbal conflict and violence
between parents takes a substantial toll on children’s emotional and behavioral
adjustment, and is associated with higher levels of depression and anxiety, and
greater difficulties with social relationships with peers (see Kouros, Cummings, & Davies,
2010, for review). While research demonstrates the powerful role
that cognitive appraisals may have for the interpretation of and response to
threatening situations in middle and later childhood, less is known regarding
the precursors of those emotional processes in the context of high levels of
interparental conflict in early childhood (Cummings & Davies, 2002; Dadds, Atkinson, Turner, Blums, & Lendich, 1999; Grych& Fincham, 1990).
In addition, fewer studies of interparental conflict and children’s emotional
development (whether with older or younger children) have considered exposure
to verbal and physical aggression in the context of other forms of
environmental adversity, such as families’ struggles with income poverty. To
pursue these questions, this study considers ways that higher levels of
exposure to arguing, threatening, and frightening behavior between adults
(alone and in conjunction with other forms of environmental adversity) may
canalize low-income children’s experience of higher levels of difficulty
processing emotional information, placing them at greater risk for difficulty
in modulating emotions of fear, anxiety, and sadness as they enter school (Blair & Raver, 2012; Yoshikawa, Aber, &
Beardslee, 2012). This theoretical framework of experiential
canalization and accompanying empirical evidence to support it are briefly
reviewed below. We then outline a set of pressing, unanswered questions in this
area of scientific inquiry, along with our hypotheses, before presenting the
methods and results of our study.
Below: (Color online) Histograms of the frequency of both forms of aggression
Full article at: http://goo.gl/mPzQgs
By:
aNew York University
bUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: C. Cybele
Raver, Institute of Human Development and Social Change, New York University,
196 Mercer Street, 8th floor, New York, NY 10012; Email: ude.uyn@revar.elebyc
The Family Life Project Key Investigators include Lynne
Vernon-Feagans, University of North Carolina; Mark Greenberg, Pennsylvania
State University; Martha Cox, University of North Carolina; Clancy Blair, New
York University; Peg Burchinal, University of North Carolina; Michael
Willoughby, University of North Carolina; Patricia Garrett-Peters, University
of North Carolina; Roger Mills-Koonce, University of North Carolina; and
Maureen Ittig, Pennsylvania State University.
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