Abusive Personality Research Articles

The Abusive Personality: Violence and Control in Intimate Relationships

The Abusive Personality: Violence and Control in Intimate Relationships

The abusive personality: violence and control in intimate relationships

Introduction. Early Explanations. Learning of Abusiveness. The Psychology of the Cycle of Violence. The Structure of the Abusive Personality. Object Relations and the Origins of Rage. An Anger Born of Fear: Attachment Rage. The Early Antecedents Studies. The Treatment of Assaultiveness.

Perpetrator Personality Effects on Post-Separation Victim Reactions in Abusive Relationships

Previous research has examined the influence of the abusive personality (Dutton, 1994a,b) on relationship dynamics. Men with high scores of abusive personality (borderline personality organization, anger and MCMI8: Negativity) generate more frequent and extreme forms of physical and emotional abuse in intimate relationships. Other lines of research have examined the role of these relationship features in influencing post-separation adjustment in women. The current study combines two data sets; one bearing on the first of these issues, the other on the second issue, in order to connect characteristics of the perpetrator's personality to post separation aspects of victim reaction. Substantial associations are found between abusive personality and relationship dynamics and between the latter and persistent attachment, trauma symptoms, and lowered self esteem in battered women.

Review of The abusive personality: Violence and control in intimate relationships.

DONALD G. DUTTONThe Abusive Personality: Violence and Control in Intimate RelationshipsNew York: Guilford Publications, Inc., 1998, 214 pages (ISBN 1-57230- 370-0, US$26.95, Hardcover)Reviewed by MARNIE E. RICEHaving devoted much of his career to the study of men who abuse their wives, Donald Dutton is unquestionably well qualified to write this book. Through his extensive research on the topic and his hands-on experience with men who batter, he has gained valuable insights into these and other men. In the late 1970s, when my colleagues and I were planning a study on applying social learning theory to the reduction of violence, Don Dutton was one of the few people who had already made headway in that area, and his ideas about how to apply psychological knowledge were formative in our early efforts. Since that early work, Dutton's ideas have evolved based on where his research results led him, and that journey is the story told in this book.In the first chapter, Dutton describes three subtypes of batterers: psychopathic, over-controlled, and cyclical. Although he acknowledges the three subtypes, this book is about only the third, the cyclical or borderline batterers. Dutton gives very cursory reviews of psychiatric, sociobiological, and feminist theories of wife assault before discussing in depth social learning explanations which formed the basis of his early thinking about the topic. Although he finds much of value in social learning explanations, he finds them lacking sufficient complexity to account for cyclical batterers.The borderline wife assaulter is chronically and intermittently abusive, but only within the family. His violence is private, directed only within the family. He is very emotional, experiencing high levels of depression, anxiety, and anger that occur as he repeatedly builds up tension and explodes. Dutton presents data on wife assaulters referred for treatment showing high correlations between measures of borderline personality and victims' reports of psychological and physical abuse.Dutton's next insight into the abusive personality came when he hypothesized that the source of the rage in cyclical batterers came from their faulty attachment styles. He proposed that the abusers had, in infancy, developed attachment styles in which they exhibit an ambivalence toward intimacy and toward those persons emotionally connected to them. Most particularly, the fearful attachment toward the mother during infancy and early childhood is experienced later in life towards the spouse: undue preoccupation with her whereabouts, lack of trust in her, and chronic anger and resentment towards her. Dutton presents data showing that men's self-reported attachment styles were related to females' reports of their partners' abusiveness. Men with high attachment scores were also high in measures of borderline personality and chronic anger. These three together, Dutton hypothesized, formed the core of the abusive personality.The next step in Dutton's elaboration of the abusive personality was his observation that abusers were in what the therapists facetiously called kindergarten: they exhibited an extreme poverty of emotion regarding their own parents and upbringing. He found that, when corrected for socially desirable responding, wife assaulters reported feeling rejected by their fathers (and, to a lesser extent, by their mothers), as well as physically and psychologically abused by their fathers. Thus, Dutton hypothesized, the men had learned to be abusive by three different processes. Parental psychological abuse resulted in a vulnerable borderline personality prone to going on the defensive to shore itself up. Physical abuse directed at them or their mothers modelled the abusive behaviour for them. And both the physical and emotional abuse left them with fearful attachment styles. Together, these generated the abusive personality.The final step in Dutton's formulation of the abusive personality was the discovery that wife assaulters scored high on measures of trauma symptoms. …

Personality Predictors of the Minnesota Power and Control Wheel

Tests were conducted to determine whether the Minnesota Power and Control Wheel (MPCW), which describes eight forms of power and control tactics, constituted a syndrome of intercorrelated actions. Criterion items for the MPCW octants were derived from Tolman's Psychological Maltreatment of Women Inventory (PMWI) completed by assaultive and nonassaultive samples. Tests were conducted of whether certain features of the abusive personality could accurately predict various octants of the MPCW. With the exception of “using the children as pawns,” all MPCW dimensions of the abuse of power and control were significantly intercorrelated, suggesting the existence of a syndrome of abuse of power and control. Personality disturbance was significantly correlated with all octants except using the children. These findings argue for a comprehensive model of abusive uses of power and control tactics integrating both social and psychological influences, rather than one that relies exclusively on either one.

Power and personality : An analysis of gay male intimate abuse

A study was conducted to investigate the issue of gay male intimate abuse in a sample of 52 couples. The objective of the study was to explore the association between relationship power dynamics and the perpetration of psychological abuse, and to investigate the correspondence between intimate abuse and factors associated with the Abusive Personality [D. G. Dutton and A. J. Starzomski (1993) “Borderline Personality in Perpetrators of Psychological and Physical Abuse,” Violence and Victims, Vol. 8, pp. 327–337; D. G. Dutton (1994a) “Behavioral and Affective Correlates of Borderline Personality Organization in Wife Assaulters,” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, Vol. 17, pp. 265–279.] The majority of participants were middle to upper class and their ethnic/racial breakdown is as follows: White (86%), Native American (7%), Asian (4%), and Other (3%). In terms of power, results indicated that the more frequent form of psychological abuse was significantly higher in relationships characterized by divided power (i.e., partners sharing decision-making authority by the partners each making decisions in different domains). This finding supports the supposition that abuse can occur in relatively egalitarian relationships. An association between intimate abuse and the Abusive Personality was also clearly observed and this personality profile seemed to characterize both members of abusive dyads. Conclusions are drawn regarding the generalizability of intimate abuse across lines of sexual orientation.

Antecedents of abusive personality and abusive behavior in wife assaulters

One hundred and forty men referred for wife assault and 45 demographically matched controls were assessed for psychological variables associated with abusive personality (anger, cyclical (borderline) personality organization (BPO) and chronic experience of trauma symptoms) and abusive behaviors (both physical and emotional) as reported by their female partners. Predictor variables for these abuse measures included the EMBU which assesses recollections of parental warmth and rejection and the Conflict Tactics Scale which assesses physical abuse in the family of origin. A composite of BPO, anger, trauma symptoms and fearful attachment called Abusive Personality (ABP) correlated .42 with wives reports of emotionally abusive behaviors. ABP was positively and significantly correlated with recollections of negative parental treatment by the abuse perpetrator. A compositive of parental rejection and verbal and physical abuse by parents correlated .41 with ABP. A discriminant function of high and low ABP found that ABP was predicted by paternal rejection, physical abuse, and absence of maternal warmth. Physical abuse by either parent correlated significantly with all subscales and total scores on the ABP measure. When combined with data showing ABP to correlate significantly with frequency of use of violence by wife assaulters (Dutton, 1995b, Dutton and Starzomski, 1993), the current study suggests a personality syndrome of assaultive males that has antecedents in the early experiences of these men. The present data suggest that family of origin experiences may have effects beyond modeling of abusive behaviors. These effects include development of a specific personality form associated with abusiveness.

The Origin and Structure of the Abusive Personality

Comparisons were made of 120 wife-assaultive men and 40 demographically matched controls. Discriminant functions correctly classified 90% (based on personality scores only) and 95% (personality and anger scores) of men into high and low categories for psychological abuse (as reported by a sample of their female partners). The measure correlated most highly with the discriminant function was borderline personality organization (BPO), but anger and other personality disorders also contributed to discriminatory power. Negativlstic (passive-aggressive + self-defeating) personality disorder was associated with the discriminant function for both emotional abuse and dominance/isolation, but narcissistic and aggressive-sadistic personality disorders were more associated with emotional abuse and avoidant personality disorder was more associated with dominance/isolation. The avoidant-negativistic profile (with associated borderline features) found for these men is also indicative of posttraumatic stress disorder. T...