La regulación aversiva en las interacciones madre-niño en díadas con historia de maltrato infantil

Abstract

We observed the interaction between mother-child dyads with history of physical abuse under two conditions: free and academic. Our aim was to gather further evidence with regard to aversive regulation processes in coercive relationships. Mother and children’s behavior were coded on different categories and analyses of sequential dependencies and temporal sequences were run. These analyses are sensitive to the
negative and positive reinforcement processes that are supposed to operate in coercive relationships as proposed by the obedience and maternal indiscrimination hypotheses. The results indicate the role of negative reinforcement as an important factor in physical abuse, because it was observed that the behavioral episodes were more adjusted to
the mother’s demands than to the child’s demands. In general, the study additionally suggested that the mothers are inconsistent before the child’s behavior, and that they usually fail in supervising the completion of instructions.