Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 27, 2026
07:56
Assessing the Coherence of Parents' Short Narratives Regarding their Child Using the Five-Minute Speech Sample Procedure
Published on: September 19, 2019
Children's expressed emotions when disclosing maltreatment
Liat Sayfan1, Emilie B Mitchell, Gail S Goodman
1Department of Psychology, University of California, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
Child Abuse & Neglect
|December 18, 2008
Summary
Children disclosing maltreatment often show neutral emotions, not distress. Negative emotions during disclosure correlate with psychopathology and fewer abuse experiences, offering insights for legal and psychological contexts.
Area of Science:
- Child Psychology
- Forensic Psychology
- Trauma Studies
Background:
- Limited research exists on children's emotional expressions during maltreatment disclosure.
- Understanding these emotions is vital for psychological theory and legal proceedings.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the emotional displays of children when disclosing experiences of maltreatment.
- To identify factors influencing emotional expression during disclosure.
Main Methods:
- Coded 124 videotaped forensic interviews for children's emotional displays.
- Assessed trauma-related symptoms (depression, dissociation, PTSD), global functioning, abuse type, and frequency.
Main Results:
- Most children exhibited neutral emotions during disclosure.
- Increased negative emotional reactions were associated with higher psychopathology.
- A higher number of abuse experiences correlated with fewer negative emotional displays.
Conclusions:
- Maltreated children may not always display strong emotions when disclosing abuse.
- Predictors of heightened negative affect include fewer abuse experiences, better global functioning, and dissociative tendencies in sexually abused children.
- Practitioners should recognize that neutral affect in disclosing children does not negate their experience of maltreatment.
Related Concept Videos
01:26Emotional Expression
Emotional expression encompasses how individuals convey their emotions through verbal communication and non-verbal cues. These non-verbal actions include facial expressions, body language, and physical gestures, such as frowning or smiling. Among these, facial expressions play a crucial role in emotional expression and are understood universally, indicating a biological basis for how humans communicate emotions.
Universal Facial Expressions
Psychologist Paul Ekman identified seven basic...
Universal Facial Expressions
Psychologist Paul Ekman identified seven basic...
01:30Socioemotional Development during Infancy
Socio-emotional development in infancy is primarily shaped by early emotional responses and social connections, with temperament playing a central role. Temperament refers to the consistent patterns in an individual's emotional and behavioral responses, observable even in infancy. By examining temperament, researchers can better understand an infant's unique ways of interacting with the world, influencing subsequent personality and socio-emotional growth.
Primary Temperament Types
Stella Chess...
Primary Temperament Types
Stella Chess...
01:20Coping Strategies: Emotion Focused
Emotion-focused coping refers to a set of strategies aimed at managing the emotional impact of stressors, rather than directly addressing their causes. This approach involves altering one's emotional response to stressful situations to reduce their psychological effects. For example, individuals might talk with a friend or engage in activities like journaling to express their feelings. Such actions can help achieve emotional clarity or release, providing the psychological stability needed to...
01:30Therapeutic Communication
Communication is a lifelong learning process. Through therapeutic communication, nurses can collect relevant assessment data, provide education and counseling, and interact during nursing interventions. Sending and receiving messages occur through verbal and nonverbal communication techniques and can happen separately or simultaneously.
Verbal communication depends on language or a prescribed way of using words so that people can share information effectively. The critical aspects of verbal...
Verbal communication depends on language or a prescribed way of using words so that people can share information effectively. The critical aspects of verbal...
02:04Bullying
A modern form of aggression is bullying. As you learn in your study of child development, socializing and playing with other children is beneficial for children’s psychological development. However, as you may have experienced as a child, not all play behavior has positive outcomes. Some children are aggressive and want to play roughly. Other children are selfish and do not want to share toys. One form of negative social interactions among children that has become a national concern is bullying.
02:34Empathy
Some researchers suggest that altruism operates on empathy. Empathy is the capacity to understand another person’s perspective, to feel what he or she feels. An empathetic person makes an emotional connection with others and feels compelled to help (Batson, 1991). Empathy can be expressed in several ways, including cognitive, affective, and motor.