“I still remember when…”: narratives of child maltreatment by emerging adults

Abstract

The present study examines autobiographical narratives of childhood memories in emerging adults, including child maltreatment experiences. To date, research is inconclusive in identifying the specific characteristics of narratives of child maltreatment. We tested whether narratives of child maltreatment contained fewer evaluative statements and more narrative immersion when compared to other emotional childhood narratives, in addition to narratives of a control group. We analyzed oral narratives of stressful, sad, angering, and happy events collected from a total of 171 college students at an English-speaking university located in Cairo (48% with a history of child maltreatment and 52% without). The hypothesis that narratives of emotional events by the maltreated group contained fewer evaluative statements was confirmed; more specifically, they contained fewer emotion words. However, groups did not differ in the degree of immersive storytelling. Our findings are essential for mental health professionals, researchers as well as legal workers to help further understand the consequences of child maltreatment. The generalizability of the findings is limited by the cultural and social specificity of the sample. Therefore, further research is needed to replicate this study in clinical samples in different cultures, conducting the research in the subjects’ first language.

Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/26904586.2022.2036285 .

Keywords:

• autobiographical narrative
• child maltreatment
• emotion regulation
• evaluation
• immersion
• PTSD
• trauma

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dr. Yasmine Saleh, Mariam Arafa, Safeya Abu-Zeid, and Sarah Ismail (American University in Cairo, Egypt) as well as Raghda El-Qabbage (Cairo University, Egypt) for providing support to the first author during the data collection period. We also thank Ashley Timberlake and Lea Seibt for dividing narratives into propositions as well as Daniela Futschik, Kira Kasteleiner, Julia Gauch, and Şeyma Türk (Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany) who performed the extensive coding for the present study.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Additional information

Funding

The work by the first author was funded by the German Business Foundation (Stiftung der deutschen Wirtschaft).