Past research has suggested that parents' ability to recognize their children's emotions is associated with an enhanced quality of parent-child interactions and appropriateness of parental caregiving behavior. Although this association has also been examined in abusive and neglectful parents, the results are mixed and do not adequately address child neglect. Based on the Social Information Processing model of child abuse and neglect, we examined the association between mothers' ability to recognize children's emotions and self- and professionals-reported child abuse and neglect. The ability to recognize children's emotions was assessed with an implicit valence classification task and an emotion labeling task. A convenience sample of 166 mothers (78 with at least one child referred to Child Protection Services) completed the tasks. Child abuse and neglect were measured with self-report and professionals-report instruments. The moderating role of mothers' intellectual functioning and socioeconomic status were also examined. Results revealed that abusive mothers performed more poorly on the negative emotions recognition task, while neglectful mothers demonstrated a lower overall ability in recognizing children's emotions. When classifying the valence of emotions, mothers who obtained higher scores on child neglect presented a higher positivity bias particularly when their scores in measures of intellectual functioning were low. There was no moderation effect for socioeconomic status. Moreover, the results for child abuse were mainly observed with self-report measures, while for child neglect, they predominantly emerged with professionals-report. Our findings highlight the important contribution of the social information processing model in the context of child maltreatment, with implications for prevention and intervention addressed.

中文翻译：

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识别儿童在虐待和忽视儿童中的情绪

过去的研究表明，父母识别孩子情绪的能力与亲子互动质量的提高和父母照顾行为的适当性有关。尽管这种关联也在虐待和疏忽的父母中进行了检查，但结果好坏参半，并没有充分解决孩子的疏忽问题。基于虐待和忽视儿童的社会信息处理模型，我们研究了母亲识别儿童情绪的能力与自我和专业人士报告的儿童虐待和忽视之间的关联。识别儿童情绪的能力通过内隐效价分类任务和情绪标记任务进行评估。一个由 166 位母亲（其中 78 位至少有一个孩子转介儿童保护服务机构）组成的便利样本完成了这些任务。使用自我报告和专业报告工具衡量虐待和忽视儿童的情况。还研究了母亲的智力功能和社会经济地位的调节作用。结果显示，虐待母亲在消极情绪识别任务中表现更差，而忽视母亲在识别儿童情绪方面的整体能力较低。在对情绪的效价进行分类时，在忽视孩子方面得分较高的母亲表现出更高的积极偏见，尤其是当她们在智力功能方面的得分较低时。对社会经济地位没有调节作用。而且，虐待儿童的结果主要是通过自我报告措施观察到的，而对于忽视儿童的结果，它们主要出现在专业人士报告中。我们的研究结果强调了社会信息处理模型在虐待儿童的背景下的重要贡献，并解决了对预防和干预的影响。