Emotional Development, Shame, and Adaptation to Child Maltreatment

Abstract

The adverse effects of maltreatment on children’s development are well documented, as is substantial variation in individual outcomes among children who are maltreated (e.g., Ackerman, Newton, McPherson, Jones, & Dykman, 1998; Kendall-Tackett, Williams, & Finkelhor, 1993; Widom, 1999). To better understand which children are most at risk, researchers and clinicians have become increasingly interested in moderators and mediators that explain when and how children who are maltreated develop adjustment problems. Emotional processes have emerged as central for elucidating how the experiences of child maltreatment affect the development of psychological distress and behavioral problems. Considerable evidence supports the negative effect of maltreatment on children’s emotional processes and development, including problems with emotion expression, communication, and regulation (Alessandri & Lewis, 1996; Beeghly & Cicchetti, 1994; Maughan & Cicchetti, 2002; Pollak, Cicchetti, Hornung, & Reed, 2000; Shipman, Zeman, Penza, & Champion, 2000). Shame has recently received increased attention by researchers and clinicians as a means for understanding how children who are maltreated become at risk for poor adjustment. The goal of this issue is to look more closely at the emotion of shame and its role in adaptation to experiences of child maltreatment. The five articles in this special section present theory and findings from scholars in the areas of emotion and maltreatment. They provide innovative information on conceptualizing, measuring, and treating shame across multiple forms of maltreatment. Emotion is the process of marking the significance of events in terms of how individuals assign meaning to them (Campos, Frankel, & Camaras, 2004). The nature of the emotion is a function of the event’s construed significance, with greater significance related to greater magnitude of emotional response. According to this view, the assignment of significance to experiences of maltreatment determines the nature of emotions (Campos et al., 2004; Scherer, Schorr, & Johnstone, 2001). Such an approach to defining emotions fits well with the generally held view of maltreatment researchers and clinicians that the evaluation of events rather than the events themselves are key to an individual’s adjustment following trauma (e.g., Cohen & Mannarino, 2002; Ferguson, 2005 [this issue]; Spaccarelli, 1994).