Evaluation of the Executive Functioning and Psychological Adjustment of Child-to-Parent Offenders: Epidemiology and Quantification of Harm

Abstract

With the aim of ascertaining if child-to-parent offenders have impairments in the executive functions and psychological maladjustment, and to quantify the potential harm and epidemiology, a field study was designed. As for this, 76 juvenile offenders sentenced for child-to-parent violence were assessed in executive functions (Stroop tasks) and psychological adjustment (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent, MMPI-A). The results showed valid responses for 75 juveniles and that data were not generally biased in line with defensiveness or malingering (differential diagnosis in justice juvenile evaluations). In psychological adjustment, the results revealed a significantly higher maladjustment among offenders on all the basic clinical scales with 23% more symptoms of hysteria than the normative population, 37% more of depressive symptoms, 44% more of hypochondriac symptoms, 68% more of psychopathic deviation symptoms, 46% more of paranoid symptoms, 26% more of psychasthenic symptoms, 24% more symptoms of schizophrenia, 17% more symptoms of hypomania, and 13% more symptoms of social introversion. Epidemiologically, the prevalence rates of clinical deterioration were significantly greater than expected (0.05 in normative sample) in hypochondria (28.0%), depression (29.3%), hysteria (29.3%), psychopathic deviation (60%), paranoia (30.7%), psychasthenia (22.7%), and schizophrenia (25.3%). As for the cognitive functions, the offenders exhibited impairments estimated at 62.0% in word reading, 47.9% in color naming, 45.8% in color-word, and 11.9% in interference and a significantly higher prevalence of caseness than expected in word reading (65%), color naming (71%), and color-word (70.2%). The implications of the results for intervention are discussed.

Psychosocial Profile of Juvenile and Adult Offenders Who Acknowledge Having Committed Child-to-Parent Violence

“…These deficits coexisted, logically, with higher impulsivity. These results are also consistent with studies where a relationship appears between executive functioning and antisocial behavior in general [ 100 ] and CPV in particular [ 101 ]. This is so in that executive functioning is closely tied to the attention, planning, and cognitive flexibility that are required for an adaptive solution of interpersonal problems.…”

Estudio de la prevalencia de las tácticas empleadas por los adolescentes ecuatorianos para la resolución de conflictos en el noviazgo

“…Se calculó la zeta para el contraste de las probabilidades observadas con una constante (.05, probabilidad trivial o insignificante; .5 probabilidad observada común; y .90 probabilidad observada habitual), tal que si la puntuación zeta es positiva y significativa la probabilidad observada es mayor que el valor de la constante; si es negativa y significativa, menor que el valor de la constante; y si zeta no es significativa, igual al valor de la constante (Fandiño et al, 2021;Vilariño et al, 2018), cuantificando el tamaño del efecto en términos del Effect Incremental Index (EII; Arias et al, 2020). La asociación entre variables se analizó con la prueba de ji cuadrado, computando la Razón de Prevalencia como tamaño del efecto y cuantificando la magnitud en probabilidad de incremento (PI; Gancedo et al, 2021).…”

Malestar psicológico y respuestas de afrontamiento al confinamiento por la COVID-19

“…The study of clinical distress was approached by contrasting the observed probability with clinical deterioration (.05) and moderate clinical deterioration (.10; Fandiño et al, 2021;Wise, 2004), estimating the effect size in Odds Ratio and interpreting it in terms of the Effect Incremental Index (EII; Redondo et al, 2019) which is an estimate of the increase in cases in the study sample over the normative sample. Complementarily, we obtained the Probability of an Inferiority Score (PIS) which, in this case, reports the probability of cases without damage (Arias et al, 2020).…”