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Updated: Aug 11, 2026
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Published on: December 2, 2015
Emotion recognition ability in mothers at high and low risk for child physical abuse
1Department of Psychology, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb 60115, USA.
Objective:
The study sought to determine if high-risk, compared to low-risk, mothers make more emotion recognition errors when they attempt to recognize emotions in children and adults.
Method:
Thirty-two demographically matched high-risk (n = 16) and low-risk (n = 16) mothers were asked to identify different emotions expressed by children and adults. Sets of high- and low-intensity, visual and auditory emotions were presented. Mothers also completed measures of stress, depression, and ego-strength.
Results:
High-risk, compared to low-risk, mothers showed a tendency to make more errors on the visual and auditory emotion recognition tasks, with a trend toward more errors on the low-intensity, visual stimuli. However, the observed trends were not significant. Only a post-hoc test of error rates across all stimuli indicated that high-risk, compared to low-risk, mothers made significantly more emotion recognition errors. Although situational stress differences were not found, high-risk mothers reported significantly higher levels of general parenting stress and depression and lower levels of ego-strength.
Conclusions:
Since only trends and a significant post hoc finding of more overall emotion recognition errors in high-risk mothers were observed, additional research is needed to determine if high-risk mothers have emotion recognition deficits that may impact parent-child interactions. As in prior research, the study found that high-risk mothers reported more parenting stress and depression and less ego-strength.
