Citation

McNeil SL, Andrews AR, Cohen JR. Child Dev. 2020; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Affiliation

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/cdev.13366

PMID

32232849

Abstract

Emotional maltreatment is a risk factor for adolescent depression. Yet, it remains unclear whether commissions and omissions of emotional maltreatment (a) confer vulnerability via distinct mechanisms and (b) demonstrate similar risk across adolescent subpopulations. The present, multiwave study examined whether school engagement and peer relationships explain the depressive effects of distinct emotional maltreatment subtypes in an at-risk child welfare sample (N = 657; ages 11-14, Age_Mean  = 12.49). The findings indicated that commission subtypes of emotional maltreatment predicted increasing depressive symptoms via increasing peer relationship problems, especially for girls. Meanwhile, decreasing school engagement was a depressogenic risk pathway for Hispanic adolescents reporting omission subtypes of emotional maltreatment. The results emphasize the importance of distinguish between emotional maltreatment subtypes to identify specific risk pathways for adolescent depression.

© 2020 Society for Research in Child Development.

Language: en