Intergenerational continuity of child maltreatment exposure, mother-offspring relationship quality, and adult romantic attachment in emerging adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Child maltreatment (CM; sexual and physical abuse, emotional maltreatment, neglect, and exposure to intimate partner violence) is a prevalent and harmful public health problem, with severe consequences for children's physical, psychological, and social development. CM exposure has been found to recur in families, indicating intergenerational continuity, which may stem from attachment-related factors. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to examine whether mothers' CM exposure is associated with attachment insecurity in their emerging adult offspring, through the emerging adult's CM exposure and mother-emerging adult relationship quality. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING: A sample of 139 mother-emerging adult dyads were recruited across Canada. METHODS: Participants completed an online survey documenting CM exposure, attachment, and relationship quality. A sequential mediation model was tested. RESULTS: An indirect association was found for mother's CM exposure with emerging adult romantic attachment anxiety, through emerging adult's CM exposure and mother-emerging adult relationship quality (β = 0.02, p = .036), and with romantic attachment avoidance through emerging adult CM exposure alone (β = 0.03, p = .047). Findings suggest that mothers reporting greater CM exposure tended to have offspring reporting greater CM exposure, which was negatively associated with mother-emerging adult relationship quality, and in turn greater emerging adult romantic attachment insecurity. CONCLUSIONS: Future research should replicate these findings using dyadic modeling with larger samples and longitudinal data. Policies increasing the accessibility of individual and group interventions for emerging adults and their parents who experienced CM are needed, particularly targeting interpersonal functioning, which may increase their social resources and reduce revictimization risk.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".