In this article, I will discuss the psychology of abusive people.
What kind of feelings do you have when you see news about abuse?
Unforgivable! I can't understand why someone would do such a thing, how dare they hurt a child! I don't understand why they do it.
However, have you ever wondered if there is something wrong with the abuser?
I believe that no one is perfect, and no one is crazy from the start. I think so.
I would like to introduce you to a study that analyzed the psychology of abusive people.I hope it will help you to have a better understanding of abuse.
Contents of the study
The cognitive model of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) proposes that trauma is accompanied by cognitive changes in distrust of others and an increase in perceived threat.
We tested whether these predictions hold true for individuals with varying levels of child maltreatment (CM), which is much more common than the traumatic events required for a PTSD diagnosis.
It was hypothesized that higher levels of CM would be associated with greater distrust and threat perceptions, and that distrust would be less likely to change in participants with more CM.
The study recruited 549 participants. (M age = 29.2, 74.5% female)
An online survey was conducted via the snowball method on CM, websites related to borderline personality disorder, and social media.
Participants self-reported their level of CM on the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ).
They then played two rounds of a fictional distrust game and indicated their perceived trustworthiness of the avatar by estimating the expected monetary deductions from the avatar.
After the first round the researchers provided feedback to the participants that very little money was taken from them.We expected those with more commercials to be less responsive to the positive feedback and less likely to adapt their estimates in the next round.
Following the game of disbelief, participants completed an emotion rating task in which they rated 60 facial expressions of emotion on a scale from "very negative" to "very positive".
We expected individuals with higher CM levels to provide more negative ratings, including angry, fearful, and happy facial expressions.
We ran a linear mixed-effects model using random intercepts of raters and stimuli (crossings) to model the random gradients of all within-individual predictors.
The results showed that higher levels of CM were associated with higher levels of distrust and weaker decreases in distrust following positive feedback.
Individuals with higher levels of CM exhibited more negatively shifted affective evaluations.
Explanation
The conclusion from this study is that the results are not all-inclusive because there are many variables.
However, it does suggest that people with post-traumatic stress disorder, or those who are more distrustful of others, are more likely to be associated with abuse.
Furthermore, people with this tendency seem to emphasize the negative aspects of other people's facial expressions, which seems to add to their distrust.
Which comes first? There was no mention of which came first, but the research model suggests that people who have experienced abuse tend to be more distrustful.This seems like a negative loop to me.
Johanna Hepp,1 Sara E. Schmitz,1 Jana Urbild,2 Kathrin Zauner,2 and Inga Niedtfeld 1
Conclusion
It seems that people who have experienced abuse are more likely to mistrust interpersonal relationships, and tend to focus on the negative aspects of facial expressions.
In my own opinion, if the person in question had a family and acted in the same way towards their children... would it be a negative chain of events? I even over-interpreted it.Studies have not proven this to be the case, so please don't listen to me.
Why can't we trust people? It seems to me that we need to consider abuse as a cause of why we cannot trust people.
