Childhood emotional abuse, self/other attachment, and hopelessness in African-American women

ABSTRACT

There is evidence that individuals emotionally abused as children endorse more hopelessness, a precursor of suicidal behavior in adulthood. However, there has been little focus on this association among African-Americans or on factors that may mediate the childhood emotional abuse (CEA) – adult hopelessness link. The present study examined whether CEA is linked to hopelessness in adulthood in African-American women suicide attempters and if adult self and other attachment models mediate this association. Participants included 116 African-American women recruited from a large, urban hospital. Results revealed that CEA had no direct effect on hopelessness in adulthood, but did have an indirect effect on hopelessness through attachment models. Bootstrapping analyses showed that higher levels of CEA were related to more negative self and other attachment models, which were then linked to higher levels of hopelessness. Implications for targeting attachment in suicide intervention programs are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• African-American
• women
• hopelessness
• attachment
• emotional abuse
• suicide

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Corrigendum

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The childhood trauma questionnaire (CTQ) has a three-item Minimization-Denial (MD) subscale that assesses respondents’ propensity to minimize their childhood trauma experiences. MacDonald et al. (2016) found that the MD subscale had a small but significant impact on the ability of the total CTQ scale and of one subscale (emotional neglect) to distinguish between clinical and community samples. However, research has also called into question the validity and utility of this subscale (MacDonald et al., 2015, 2016). The authors found that not removing such individuals scoring high on MD leads to a more conservative estimate of the true association between childhood trauma and it sequelae. Furthermore, is unclear how to statistically treat individuals high in MD as there is no simple cutoff MD score for valid versus invalid responding. Therefore, we did not eliminate participants on the basis of their MD scores.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Center for Injury Prevention and Control [Grant Number R49 CCR421767-01] (Group interventions with suicidal African-American women) awarded to Dr. Nadine J. Kaslow. We want to acknowledge and thank the funding source for supporting this research, and the participants for taking part in this study.