179: Emotion Regulation in Sexually Abused Preschoolers: The Contribution of Parental Factors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Child sexual abuse (SA) is associated with emotional and behavioral difficulties in children such as emotion regulation (ER) deficits. Close to 50% of mothers of SA children report having themselves been sexually victimized as children, and are at risk of experiencing significant distress that could interfere with their ability to provide support. Our aim was to explore the contribution of parental factors (history of sexual victimization in childhood and the current level of distress) to the prediction of SA preschoolers' ER competencies. The sample consisted of 153 preschoolers (M = 4.3 years; SD = 0.92) and their parents (93% maternal figure). There were 75 (14 boys) SA children and 78 (21 boys) non SA controls. Children's ER competencies were evaluated by parents with the Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC). Parental psychological distress was evaluated using the Psychiatric Symptom Index (PSI). The contribution of parental factors to the prediction of children's ER competencies was tested using regression analysis. Victimisation status of the child was entered first, then the parental factors and the child's gender. Around 32% of SA children reported a single episode of abuse, 42% more than two episodes and 26% abuse lasting for more than six months. Complete or attempted penetration was described in 47% of cases. An immediate family member was identified as the perpetrator in 53% of cases. Entering the victimisation status of the child in the regression analysis predicting scores on the emotional lability/negativity scale of the ERC gets an R2 = 0.06 F (1,141) = 9.0, P<0.01. Adding parental psychological distress resulted in a significant increment in R2 = 0.12, F(2, 140) = 9.54, P<0.001. With the addition of parental history of SA, the prediction reached R2 = 0.16, F(3, 139) = 8.66, P<0.001, and with the addition of child's gender, the prediction reached R2 = 0.18, F(4, 138) = 7.65, P<0.001. When predicting child's score on the emotion regulation scale of the ERC, child's victimisation status alone gets an R2 = 0.23 F (1,141) = 41.9, P<0.001 and the only other variable adding significantly to the score prediction is child's male gender with R2 = 0.27 F (1, 140) = 26.5, P<0.001. Parental factors appear to contribute to some aspects of children's ER, namely display of exuberance, temper tantrums and emotional negativity. ER competencies being central to mental health, helping parents overcome their own distress might be helpful in fostering resilience in sexually abused preschoolers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".