Citation

Milojevich HM, Norwalk KE, Sheridan MA. Dev. Psychopathol. 2019; 31(3): 847-857.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology and Neuroscience,University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,Chapel Hill, NC,USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Cambridge University Press)

DOI

10.1017/S0954579419000294

PMID

31014408

Abstract

Maltreatment increases risk for psychopathology in childhood and adulthood, thus identifying mechanisms that influence these associations is necessary for future prevention and intervention. Emotion dysregulation resulting from maltreatment is one potentially powerful mechanism explaining risk for psychopathology. This study tests a conceptual model that distinguishes deprivation and threat as distinct forms of exposure with different pathways to psychopathology. Here we operationalize threat as exposure to physical and/or sexual abuse and deprivation as exposure to neglect. We test the hypothesis that threat and deprivation differentially predict use of avoidant strategies and total regulation. Data were drawn from the Longitudinal Studies on Child Abuse and Neglect (LONGSCAN study; N = 866), which followed high-risk children from age 4 to 18. At age 6, children and their parents reported on adversity exposure. Case records documented exposure to abuse and neglect. At 18, adolescents reported on regulation strategies and psychopathology. Regression analyses indicated that greater exposure to threat, but not deprivation, predicted greater use of avoidant strategies in adolescence. Moreover, avoidance partially mediated the longitudinal association between exposure to threat in early childhood and symptoms of internalizing psychopathology in adolescence.

RESULTS suggest that abuse and neglect differentially predict regulation strategy use and that regulation strategy use predicts psychopathology.

Language: en

Keywords

Dimensional Model of Adversity and Psychopathology; abuse; emotion dysregulation; maltreatment; neglect; psychopathology