Verbal Abuse and Cognition in the Developing Mind

Abstract

This study compared a group of 90 high verbally abused and 90 low verbally abused children on tests of cognitive development. The Cognitive Assessment System made up of attention, coding (simultaneous processing and successive processing), and planning subtests were administered to the high-abused and low-abused children. Results indicate that the high-abused children scored lower than the low-abused children on all the tests. In attention and simultaneous processing tasks, the younger children in the high-abused group performed better than the older children, suggesting better attention strategies and an absence of negative thought in the younger groups of high-abused children. Girls performed better than boys on the attention task. Results suggest that verbal abuse is associated with less favorable neuropsychological functioning.

KEYWORDS:

• child maltreatment
• emotional abuse
• neurodevelopment
• psychological maltreatment
• verbal abuse

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work is part of doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Delhi by the first author. The authors wish to thank all the children who participated in the construction of the verbal abuse questionnaire and the main study. The authors acknowledge the cooperation of the parents and the teachers in the conduction of the study.