Dix and his colleagues (Dix and Grusec, 1985, Dix et al., 1989) found that mothers indicated they would use more 'power-assertive' discipline strategies when they inferred, from vignettes of child behaviour, that the child was responsible for the negative outcomes. Dix (1991) reports that there is emerging evidence, primarily from research with distressed mothers, that strong negative emotions (usually depression) have a negative effect on parental cognitions and subsequently affect parenting judgements and parental behaviour. Depressed mothers have been shown to be less
attentive and monitor their children less than non-depressed mothers (e.g., Cox, Puckering, Pound and Mills, 1987), although whether this is mediated by causal
attributions is not addressed in these studies (see section 2.3.5 regarding maternal depression).
Parental beliefs about the causes o f difficult' (non-compliant) child behaviour may also influence how well they cope with their child's behaviour (e.g., Affleck, Allen,
McGrade and McQueeney, 1982; Stratton and Swaffer, 1988). Bugental et al., (1993) link such research with that of the social information-processing models developed in the study of the peer and other interpersonal relationships of children. This model essentially construes attributions (hostile attributional bias) as a central organiser o f aggressive responses within such relationships (Dodge and Coie, 1987).
The role of attributions in distressed interpersonal relationships, particularly marital couples is relatively well-established (e.g. Holtzworth-Munroe and Jacobson, 1985; Fincham, 1985; Fincham and Bradbury, 1988; Miller and Bradbury, 1994), however studies of parental attributions ha been less productive. Some o f the findings from research on distressed couples attributions have shed light on a number o f issues which are relevant to the study of parental attributions.
First, attributions may be related to the emotional impact of partner behaviour, which in turn affects behavioural responses to partners (e.g. Fincham and O'Leary, 1983; Bradbury and Fincham, 1990, 1992). The importance o f emotional appraisals on coping has also been described (see section 4.1.2). Second, dimensions o f causal attributions have been found to distinguish between distressed and non-distressed marital couples (e.g. Holtzworth-Munroe and Jacobson, 1985, Fincham, 1985).
Third the actor-ob server bias (Jones and Nisbett, 1972) whereby
people attribute their own actions to situational (external) factors and others actions to internal causes, may not hold true for attributions about significant others, such as partners or family (e.g., Larrance and Twentyman, 1983; Fincham, Beach and Baucom,
1987). Fourth, the link between 'maladaptive' attributions and behaviour within marital relationships has been confirmed (Fincham and Bradbury, 1988), however there
remains some ambiguity about the exact nature of this relationship. Some studies suggest that the association is stronger in nondistressed couples (Fincham, Beach and Baucom, 1987) and others suggest it is stronger in distressed spouses (Miller and Bradbury, 1994).
Finally, the importance of considering attributions for partner behaviour relative to those for one's own behaviour is another important contribution to the study of attributions in distressed relationships. The related concept of a 'negative attributional bias' in which less benign attributions for partners are made than for self (Fincham, Beach and Baucom, 1987) may also apply to parent-child relationships.
Parental attributions as 'organisers* o f behaviour
When considering maladaptive parental beliefs, the notion of attributions as
'organisers' or mediators of behavioural responses in caregiving situations is central to the research linking parental beliefs to parental behaviours. The following studies support this link and provide evidence for a transactional model of child physical abuse proposed by Bugental, Mantyla and Lewis (1989) which highlights the role o f parental causal attributions.
It has been shown that the beliefs parents hold about the causes of'difficult' child behaviour may influence the success of their coping responses (Affieck, Allen, McGrade and McQueeney, 1982). Mothers of 43 infants with severe perinatal complications were asked about their beliefs regarding the causes o f these medical problems. They found that maternal parity was related to causal attributions, with mothers o f first-born babies more likely to blame others and to attribute the
likely to blame themselves for the infant's condition. The mothers who blamed their own behaviour (e.g. smoking, exertion during pregnancy) for their infant's medical problems reported more positive mood states and expected to have less difficulty coping with the infant, than mothers who attributed the causes to others (e.g. obstetric error, delay in special care procedures).
The authors link this to the 'just world' hypothesis (Lemer and Miller, 1978), whereby blaming and feeling resentful to others for negative events is seen to threaten a just world view leading to more negative perceptions of events, and poorer coping
responses, than those who take responsibility for negative outcomes. The relevance to the present study is that mothers expected to cope better with their child's disability in the long term when they attributed the cause to Internal factors. It is possible that perceived control over the outcome had more to do with this effect, however the Control dimension of causal beliefs was not specifically measured in this study. Much of the research referring to attribution theory employs the dimensions of Control and Intemality interchangeably, when arguably, they address different facets o f causal beliefs.
Parental attributions and child abuse
The following studies address parental attributions in the context of child abuse. They focus on maternal causal attributions and the distinction between abusive and non- abusive groups. Larrance and Twentyman (1983) compared the attributions for children's behaviour in three groups of 10 abusive, neglecting and non-abusive mothers. Mothers in this study were asked to respond to a series o f standardised photographs depicting their own and an unrelated child (mean age 4.5 yrs) in various situations, some involving child transgressions or misbehaviour (such as broken toys, drawing on walls). Following presentation of the photographs, mothers were asked to
tell a story about their child's behaviour in the photographs and then asked to predict what had happened.
In order to assess causal attributions, mothers were then asked to explain why their child would behave in certain ways in these situations. Attributions were coded for Internal and Stable dimensions on a scale of 1 to 9 (1 = Internal, 9 = External). Using these two dimensions only, Larrance and Twentyman (1983) found support for their hypothesis that there would be a significant tendency for abusing and neglectful mothers to make more internal and stable attributions than comparison mothers for negative child behaviours (i.e. when their own child had transgressed). They did not find the expected difference in attributions between the abusive and neglectful mothers.
Larrance and Twentyman (1983) suggest that their findings indicate that there are systematic differences in the attributions made by abusive and non-abusive mothers, with abusing/neglectful mothers making attributions to dispositional (internal and stable) causes for child transgressions. This combined with negative expectations for children's behaviour are seen to represent a cognitive bias or distortion which may contribute to child abuse. This distortion can be seen in the attribution o f negative behaviours to dispositional causes in young children for whom there should be a protective bias (Dix and Grusec, 1985).
There are some methodological criticisms of this study that need to be addressed, however, the importance of the finding that there are differences between abusive and non-abusive mothers in their causal explanations for child behaviours need not be negated. Firstly, the process of extracting and coding attributions from taped interviews was not made explicit, and it was implied that their reliance on the experience o f the authors in the field of attribution research which may limit its applicability to other studies. Secondly, the number of causal attributions on which ratings were made was not presented. Mothers were asked for explanations about five
specific, hypothetical situations, however it remains unclear how many causal
statements were extracted. Thirdly, it is not clear that attributions about hypothetical situations relate to attributions about real-life negative events. Fourthly, dimensions such as Controllability and Globality were not included in the coding of attributions. Given the importance of control and power, particularly in abusive families, it is unfortunate that a dimension for control over outcome was not included in this analysis. This relates to the final criticism which is that attributions for the mothers' O'wn behaviour in different caregiving situations were not sought or examined.
A further study by Bauer and Twentyman (1985) revealed attributional differences between physically abusive and neglectful mothers (n=24) and non-abusive mothers (n=12), using taped vignettes of parent-child situations. The attributional measure in this study consisted of asking mothers to what extent they thought their child had acted malevolently in the different situations, (such as the child being hurt, or child engaging in 'intentional rule breaking'). Bauer and Twentyman (1985) suggest that their findings indicate that the abusing mothers were most likely to believe that their child was acting intentionally to annoy them, and that this finding is linked to the previous research (Larrance and Twentyman, 1983) indicating that physically abusive mothers 'misattribute' their children's behaviour, which in turn increases the likelihood of violence towards the child. This study is subject to the same criticisms as above, however the authors suggestions that abusive parents may display some form of cognitive bias towards their child and a greater reactivity to negative child behaviours are plausible.
The notion o f high reactivity to unresponsive or difficult children has been confirmed in a study by Bugental et al., (1993). In a study of 160 mothers of school age children, those mothers who felt that they had low control over negative outcomes (as measured by the Parent Attribution Test) were highly reactive to negative child behaviours, and showed high levels of'defensive arousal' (increased heart rate and skin conductance).
Although this study did not specifically look at abusive mothers, previous studies have indicated that mothers who attribute low control to adults for negative parent-child interactions are more likely to have parenting difficulties, including child physical abuse (e.g., Bugental, Mantyla and Lewis, 1989; Bugental, Blue and Lewis, 1990).
Stratton and Swaffer (1988) used the Leeds Attributional Coding System (LACS) (Stratton, Munton, Hanks, Heard and Davidson, 1988) to investigate causal attributions in abusive and non-abusive mothers, and a further group of mothers of handicapped children. The abusive mothers were more likely to make Internal attributions for child behaviour and External attributions for their own behaviour. In addition, abusive mothers were twice as likely to ascribe Control to their child for child behaviours. Stratton and Swaffer suggest that the pattern of attributions (Internal and Controllable) by abusive mothers would lead to a "powerful tendency to blame the child when things go wrong" (1988, p. 210). Unfortunately, the valence of the
outcomes of the attributional statements coded was not presented, and so it is unclear whether both positive and negative outcomes were coded separately or together. As most o f the literature to date has focussed on attributions for child /wwbehaviour or
c2iXQ%\wm% failures, it would have been helpful for data relating to negative and
positive attributions to be analysed separately. The study by Stratton and Swaffer does support the growing literature indicating the importance of investigating parental attributions in families where abuse has taken place. In addition, Stratton and Swaffer (1988) used a systematic coding system, the Leeds Attributional Coding System to identify and code causal attributions, and highlights the importance of investigating parental attributions for self, as well as for child, particularly on the dimension of controllability.
A further study by Silvester and Stratton (1991) showed attributional discrepancies in a small group of abusive (n=9) compared to non-abusive mothers (n=15). Mothers were interviewed and the LACS (Stratton et al., 1988) was used to code attributions
on five dimensions (Stable, Global, Internal, Personal and Controllable). This study focussed on negative outcomes only, and indicated that the abusive mothers attributed more control to their child than to themselves for negative outcomes, suggesting that the dimension of Controllability is an important variable in attributional studies in child abuse research.
The work o f Fincham, Beach and Baucom (1987) highlighting the importance of relational attributions and of Bugental et al., (1993) which focuses on the control dimension suggests that the discrepancy of control attributed to parent compared to child is an important direction for future research in parental attributions.
The perception o f control, and in particular, the discrepancy between control to child and control to parent, is central to the transactional model of child abuse proposed by Bugental and her colleagues (Bugental, 1987; Bugental, Mantyla and Lewis, 1989), (see Figure 4.i below). This model is based on Bugental and Shennum's (1984) model of parent-child interaction which identifies causal attributions as modifiers of
communication within caregiving situations. They showed that mothers with low self- perceived power as caregivers were selectively reactive to child unresponsiveness, and that the parental communication pattern (characterised by negative affect and low assertion) maintained unresponsive child behaviour.
'difficult' — > parental — > parental — > parental — > 'difficult' child
child attributions experienced expressed behaviour
behaviour affect affect
Figure 4.i: Model for role of attributions as 'moderators' in parent-child interactions. (Bugental, 1987).
In extending this model to abusive parental behaviour, Bugental (1987) suggests that certain parental causal beliefs (low control to self and high control to child for
negative outcomes) may sensitize the parent to negative child behaviour, thus
increasing the risk of abuse. In keeping with attribution theory, Bugental, Mantyla and Lewis (1989) suggest that attributions are likely to be of most importance in caregiving situations which are ambiguous or aversive.
Attributions are seen to moderate parental reactions to the stressful situation at two levels, at an initial preconscious level and at a controlled level of cognitive appraisal (Bugental, 1992). Precognitions are suggested to operate at an automatic or unaware level and may heighten parental sensitivity to certain negative behaviours of the child. In this way, the role of early experiences of the mother may be seen to be an important influence on the way she interprets ambiguous or negative caregiving situations.
This is consistent with ecological models of child abuse (Belsky, 1980; Belsky and Vondra, 1989) which highlight the role of an individual's own history o f care in their subsequent parental functioning. Similarly, childhood experiences have been shown to lead to depression and to selective recall of negative life events (Bre^win, 1989), which may influence their attributions regarding current life events.
Bugental (1992) suggests that parents who have a schematic representation of the parent-child relationship which consistently places them in a position of low power will show more adverse reactions, that is, defensive arousal and negative affect, than parents who do not show this'chronically accessible schema' (Bugental, 1992). It appears that, in this model, the automatic cognitions which produce the physiological reactivity to negative child behaviour (Bugental and Cortez, 1988), may 'prime' the mothers to appraise these behaviours in a negative light, thus maintaining this distressed pattern o f interacting and culminating in physical abuse o f the child. In summary, although it seems unlikely that all situations in which there are power discrepancies will lead to physical abuse, the consideration of other dimensions of causal beliefs may be enlightening.
The model proposed by Bugental, Mantyla and Lewis (1989) provides a useful framework within which to conduct research on parental attributions in abusive families.
Consistent with ecological and other transactional models of child maltreatment, Bugental et al, (1989) also incorporate the role of external stressors (such as social and economic disadvantage) in exacerbating the chances of actual abuse. Bugental et al, (1993) have focussed on the perceived power held in the parent-child relationship, as a particularly salient feature of parent's cognitive constructions of their relationship with their child. They highlight the important concept of control over outcomes, particularly negative or 'failure' events. Although it is unlikely that a perceived power disadvantage necessarily leads to abuse, it has been shown to predict defensive arousal and negative affect towards the child (Bugental, Blue and Lewis, 1990) and is related to other negative caregiving outcomes (see next section 2.3.3 on Parental attributions and perceived control).