ICPR Abstracts: Session 24

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Session 24: Symposium

Psychological Aggression in the Family

Psychological Aggression and the Longitudinal Course
of Newlywed Marriage

Erika Lawrence and Thomas N. Bradbury
University of California, Los Angeles

Personal accounts by battered women (Deschner, 1984) 
and cross- sectional studies (O'Leary & Curley, 1986; 
Straus, 1974) suggest that psychological aggression is a 
critical factor in the etiology of interpersonal violence.  
Murphy and O'Leary (1989) found that individuals' own 
psychological aggression and their psychological 
victimization predicted initial incidents of their own 
physical aggression in marriage. However, most research 
on psychological aggression in marriage has been cross-
sectional, prompting researchers to call for longitudinal 
examinations of aggression (Murphy & O'Leary, 1989).  
The purpose of this paper is to report a study that 
examines the extent to which psychological aggression is 
related to the development of marital dysfunction.
        Newlywed couples who responded to newspaper 
ads completed Straus' (1979) Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) 
for the year prior to marriage, which was used to divide 
spouses into three groups: nonaggressive (NA), 
psychologically aggressive (including verbal aggression) 
(VA), and physically aggressive (PA). Spouses completed 
the Marital Adjustment Test (MAT; Locke & Wallace, 
1959) every six months over the first three and a half years 
of marriage; MAT scores did not differ across groups at 
Time 1.
        Failure of a subject's marriage to survive was 
operationally defined as experiencing severe marital 
discord (MAT < or = 80), temporary or permanent 
separation, or divorce. Survival times were counted in 
months of continuous marital satisfaction.  The longest 
survival time possible was 45 months.  Intervals of 
survival times were set to 6 months, and the midpoint of 
each interval was used in the analyses.  Any spouse still in 
a satisfied marriage after 45 months was considered 
censored.
        Preliminary analyses showed that of the 57 
couples in the study, 2 (3.5%) were NA, 39 (68.4%) were 
VA, and 16 (28.1%) were PA.  Of the 57 wives, 2 (3.5%) 
were NA, 29 (50.9%) were VA, and 26 (45.6%) were PA.  
Nineteen husbands (33.3%) and fourteen wives (24.6%) 
reported severe discord at least once throughout the seven 
assessments. 
     Among husband aggressors (NA, VA, and PA groups), 
survival curves did not significantly differ for husbands' or 
wives' marital survival. Among wife aggressors (NA, VA, 
and PA groups), survival curves did not significantly differ 
for husbands' marital survival, but did significantly differ 
for wives' marital survival, X2(1, N = 57) = 4.87, p = .03, 
with PA couples experiencing the greatest level of marital 
failure, followed by VA couples, and finally by NA 
couples.  Pairwise comparisons showed that the VA group 
significantly differed >from the PA group, X2(2, N = 57) = 
4.25, p = .04, with the PA group experiencing greater 
marital failure than the VA group.  The NA group did not 
differ from the PA group. 
      These results show that psychological aggression does 
not appear to generally affect the longitudinal course of 
marriage. Interestingly, however, physically aggressive 
wives were less maritally satisfied and stable 
longitudinally than psychologically aggressive wives, but 
VA wives did not differ from NA wives.  It is possible that 
physically aggressive wives may be fighting back against 
physical victimization. Because psychological aggression 
predicts physical aggression, which severely affects both 
individual and dyadic factors for spouses, research is 
critical to prevent marital violence through decreasing 
psychological aggression and problem-solving skills 
(Murphy & O'Leary, 1989).


Children of Psychologically Abused Women:
Effects of Maternal Adjustment and Parenting on 
Child Outcomes

Ileana Arias and Amy Street
University of Georgia

Children who witness interparental violence exhibit higher 
and more severe levels of externalizing and internalizing 
problems (e.g., Jouriles, Murphy, & O'Leary, 1989). The 
detrimental impact of exposure to interparental violence 
may be a direct result of such exposure or may be 
mediated by parental psychopathology and/or deficits in 
parenting patterns. 
     Unfortunately, research examining the impact of 
domestic violence on child outcomes has focused on 
physical violence, ignoring the potential detrimental 
effects of psychological aggression. Anecdotal reports by 
battered women, however, suggest that the effects of 
psychological abuse on their psychological adjustment and 
coping patterns may be as detrimental as those of their 
physical victimization, or more so. Arias (1995) 
corroborated clinical reports and found that battered 
women's psychological abuse was significantly related to 
their depressive and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 
symptomatology. The effects of psychological abuse on 
psychological adjustment and coping remained significant 
after controlling for frequency and severity of physical 
assaults. On the other hand the effects of battered women's 
physical abuse on their psychological adjustment was 
nonsignificant after controlling for psychological abuse. 
The role of psychological abuse in adjustment was found 
to be identical among a comparable group of nonbattered 
women. Given the apparent relationships between 
women's psychological adjustment and their parenting and, 
subsequently, their children's adjustment, it is important to 
examine the role of women's psychological abuse in child 
outcomes. 
     Information from 213 families participating in a 
longitudinal study of adolescent development was 
examined. Among other things, all family members 
provided information on family violence, psychological 
adjustment, parenting behaviors, and child externalizing 
and internalizing behaviors. Preliminary analyses 
confirmed expectations that women's psychological abuse 
is a significant predictor of their depressive 
symptomatology. Depressive symptomatology, in turn, was 
a significant predictor of negative, especially neglectful, 
parenting behaviors which were predictive of children's 
internalizing and externalizing behaviors. The 
implications for understanding and addressing family 
processes among abusive families will be addressed. 


Understanding Psychological Aggression:
Parent-Child Relationships

Frank D. Fincham and Suan I. Kemp-Fincham
University of Wales

Interest in the area of child abuse and neglect have 
mushroomed in recent years. Last year 3,140,000 
suspected cases of abuse were reported, representing a 
63% increase since 1985. However, only 8% of these 
reports were for emotional maltreatment suggesting that 
this form of maltreatment may not be as recognizable 
(Wiese & Daro, 1995). The present paper argues that 
focusing on psychological aggression may do much to 
further understanding of emotional maltreatment. It 
therefore (a) examines at a theoretical level the notion of 
psychological aggression in the parent-child relationship 
and (b) reports the results of a study that examines 
psychological aggression in a community sample of 6th 
and 7th graders. 
      There are a number of issues relevant to understanding 
emotional maltreatment of children. Perhaps the most 
important concerns operationalization. There is debate as 
to whether or not parent (in)actions have to result in 
demonstrable effects on children, whether the (in)actions 
have to be shown to be intentional, and whether they are 
culturally appropriate. Rather than aim to have an all-
inclusive definition of emotional maltreatment that 
includes aspects of child neglect, it is argued that the 
essence of emotional maltreatment is captured by the 
construct of psychological aggression. Looking to progress 
made in the study of childhood depression once adult 
criteria were adopted, it is argued that similar progress 
will occur in the study of emotional maltreatment by 
adopting criteria already developed in studying 
psychological aggression. 
      These criteria were examined in a study of 150 
children recruited from a midwestern community. The 
parent-child version of the Conflict Tactics Scale was 
administered along with several other parenting measures 
and measures of child adjustment. Preliminary analyses 
suggest that psychological aggression by the parents is 
differentially related to child outcome depending on the 
sex of the parent. The implications of such findings for 
understanding the development of psychopathology will be 
discussed. 

Emotional Abuse and Sibling Relationship Quality:
The Moderating Role of Sibling Temperaments
and the Potential Buffering Role of Sibling 
Relationships

Gene H.Brody
University of Georgia

Research on the determinants of variability in sibling 
relationship quality has focused on the contributions of 
parent-child relationships and individual child 
temperaments. Positive parent- child relationships are 
hypothesized to contribute to the development of prosocial 
orientations among siblings, in accordance with 
attachment (Sroufe & Fleeson, 186) and social learning 
(Parke, MacDonald, Beitel, & Bhavnagri, 1988) theories. 
Attachment theorists have proposed that children develop 
internal representations of relationships from interactions 
with their primary caregivers, which they subsequently use 
in maintaining other relationships. Social learning 
theorists have shown that behavior patterns enacted during 
parent-child interactions are generalized to sibling 
(Patterson, 1984) and peer (Parke et al., 1988) 
interactions. Others have found higher levels of positivity 
in the parent-child relationship to be linked to higher 
levels of positive affectivity and prosocial behavior in the 
sibling relationship. Conversely, negativity in parent-child 
relationships is associated with aggressive, self-protective 
behavior in sibling relationships (e.g., Brody, Stoneman, 
& Burke, 1987; Brody, Stoneman, & McCoy, 1992; Dunn 
& Kendrick, 1982; Hetherington, 1988).
        Children's temperaments have played a 
prominent role in studies of sibling relationship quality.  
Children with highly active and emotionally intense 
temperaments, which some researchers have termed 
difficult, consistently have been shown to be at risk for 
experiencing high levels of conflict and negative 
affectivity in their sibling relationships in both 
contemporaneous (Brody et al., 1987; Dunn & Munn, 
1986; Stocker et al., 1989; Stoneman & Brody, 1993) and 
five-year longitudinal (Brody, Stoneman, & McCoy, 1994) 
examinations. 
     This study examines the hypothesis that, when one or 
both siblings experience psychological aggression from 
their parents, the sibling relationship will be characterized 
by conflicted, self- protective behavior. The need to go 
beyond main effect models and specify the ways in which 
individual child characteristics moderate children's 
responses lead us to predict that the effects of 
psychological aggression would be most apparent in 
sibling dyads comprising at least one child with a difficult 
temperament. Finally, Rutter (1985) proposed that the 
influence of protective factors, such as positive parent-
child or sibling relationships, may be strongest under high-
risk conditions. Accordingly, we predicted that some 
children who experience emotional abuse would 
nevertheless be able to establish affectively positive 
sibling relationships. When emotionally abused children 
did experience the buffering provided by positive 
relationships with their siblings girls would experience 
fewer internalizing symptoms and boys would experience 
fewer externalizing symptoms. 

Discussant
Pepper Schwartz
University of Washington