Maltreated and nonmaltreated children's evaluations of emotional fantasy
Maltreated and nonmaltreated children's evaluations of emotional fantasy
复制标题
DOI：
10.1016/j.chiabu.2009.02.009
复制
发表时间：
2010-02-01
影响因子：
4.8
通讯作者：
Lyon, Thomas
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Carrick, Nathalie;Quas, Jodi A.;Lyon, Thomas
儿童遭受虐待后可能会产生一系列发展后果（见Cicchetti和Toth，2003年）。通常，后果反映了认知发育延迟和心理健康功能低下（例如，Myers等人，2002年）。然而，当被虐待的儿童在从事与情感相关的任务时，有时会表现出相对于未被虐待的儿童的上级表现（例如，Pollak & Tolley-Schell，2003）。如果受虐待儿童表现出认知缺陷，但在某些类型的情绪处理的优势，一个重要的问题是，如何虐待儿童将作出反应时，给予情感负荷的认知任务，也就是说，任务中的认知判断可能会受到任务中固有的情感内容的影响。其中一项任务涉及儿童辨别幻想和现实中积极和消极信息的能力。对典型发育儿童的研究表明，尽管即使是年幼的学龄前儿童也能成功地辨别幻想和现实中的中性信息，但他们在评估情感唤起信息时往往不太成功（Harris，2000）。与本研究直接相关的是，当儿童观看描绘积极和消极的幻想和真实的事件的图像，并报告这些事件是否会在真实的生活中发生时，他们倾向于声称积极事件会发生，消极事件不会发生，而不管幻想或真实的内容如何（Carrick & Quas，2006; Samuels & Taylor，1994）。对于儿童的反应，至少提出了两种解释。首先，反应可能反映了儿童只希望某些事件发生（Carrick & Quas，2006; Woolley，1997）。也就是说，孩子们发现积极的事件很有吸引力，希望它们发生，但认为消极的事件是潜在的威胁，因此不希望它们发生。
A range of developmental consequences can result following children’s exposure to maltreatment (see Cicchetti & Toth, 2003). Typically, consequences reflect delays in cognitive development and poor mental health functioning (eg, Myers e t al., 2002). However, maltreated children sometimes demonstrate superior performance relative to nonmaltreated children when engaged in emotion-relevant tasks (eg, Pollak & Tolley-Schell, 2003). If maltreated children exhibit cognitive deficits, but strengths in some types of emotional processing, an important question arises as to how maltreated children would respond when given emotionally laden cognitive tasks, that is, tasks in which cognitive judgments may be affected by the emotional content inherent in the tasks. One such task concerns children’s ability to discern fantasy and reality for positive and negative information.Research on typically developing children suggests that, although even young preschoolers can successfully discern fantasy and reality for neutral information, they are often less successful when evaluating emotionally evocative information (Harris, 2000). Directly relevant to the present study, when children view images depicting positive and negative fantastic and real events and report whether the events can occur in real life, they tend to claim that positive events can occur and negative events cannot occur, regardless of the fantastic or real content (Carrick & Quas, 2006; Samuels & Taylor, 1994). At least two explanations for children’s responses have been proposed. First, responses may reflect children’s desires for only certain events to occur (Carrick & Quas, 2006; Woolley, 1997). That is, children find the positive events appealing and want them to occur, but perceive the negative events as potentially threatening and consequentially do not want them to occur.