The long-term consequences of childhood emotional maltreatment on development: (mal)adaptation in adolescence and young adulthood.

Over the past 40 years, child maltreatment research has become a demanding, distinct and distinguished field of empirical inquiry. A relative latecomer to this area, child emotional maltreatment has lagged behind other forms of maltreatment in research funding, publishing, and practice (Behl, Conyngham, & May, 2003). Although research on child emotional maltreatment has grown steadily since its formalized introduction to the field 20 years ago (Brassard, Germaine, & Hart, 1987; Cicchetti & Nurcombe, 1991; Garrison, 1987), investigations have focused on childhood effects to the relative exclusion of longer-term, prospective studies with their attendant focus on adolescent and older populations. Studies employing child protection, high risk, and clinical samples have been similarly limited, leavingmore questions than answers about the unique, developmental impact and process of child emotional maltreatment. As part of the effort to address such questions, researchers gathered at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development in April of 2007 to discuss new data about the relation between childhood emotional maltreatment and a variety of long-term (mal)adaptive outcomes in varied samples. This special section of Child Abuse & Neglect represents an extension and expansion of these early conversations. While the focus is on youth outcomes, we also consider issues central to definition, identification, and intervention. In response to recent appeals for greater attention to emotionalmaltreatment broadly, and to its long-term consequences specifically (e.g., Wright, 2007), these papers illustrate novel and theoretically grounded approaches to understanding how and why child emotional maltreatment influences (mal)adaptation in adolescence and young adulthood, with a particular eye toward informing practical efforts to decrease emotional maltreatment and/or to mitigate its negative consequences. These papers converge in their emphasis on the need to assess explicitly for emotional maltreatment, both in its own right, andwhenanyother formofmaltreatment is queried in research or practice. Yet a vexing issue is how todetermine a threshold of emotionally malevolent caregiving – when is bad, bad enough? Emotional maltreatment may appear in many forms – a physically and/or emotionally uninvolved parent; parents who constantly bicker, yell, undermine and fight with each other in front of the child; perfectionistic parents with unreasonably demanding expectations and critical observations. Other forms of emotional maltreatment reflect discrete acts, such as threatening the child where physical injury potential is high (e.g., hanging a child over a balcony, locking a child out of the home in unsafe conditions), or a pattern of repeated destructive actions (e.g., spurning, terrorizing, isolating, ignoring, exploiting, corrupting, Brassard & Donovan, 2006; Hart & Brassard, 1991). Yet the categorization of emotional abuse and neglect in current child welfare policy is based on a critical, though ambiguously operationalized, threshold of emotional harm. For example, child protectionprotocolsmay require behaviors to result in “serious emotional harm;” “imminent danger of suffering irreversible emotional damage;” or child “emotional illness” in order to qualify as emotional maltreatment (e.g., Ontario Risk Assessment Model Eligibility Spectrum, 2006). Meanwhile, it is readily accepted that sexual abuse, physical abuse, and failure to provide life’s physical essentials for a child is emotionally (and developmentally) harmful, andwarrants efforts to intervene and protect. In these and other policies, key questions arise: (1) should emotional maltreatment be regarded as its own category? and, its corollary, (2) does emotional maltreatment yield unique impairment to children? These questions become evenmore challenging whenwe look forward to consider the potential for enduring effects of child emotional maltreatment on adolescent and young adult functioning. Adopting a developmental psychopathology perspective, this section addresses the impact of childhood emotional maltreatment on adolescent and young adult adjustment with respect to both psychopathology (e.g., anxiety, depression, dating violence) and competence (e.g., self-esteem, peer relationship quality). The studies herein employ process-level analyses to identify specific mechanisms by which emotional maltreatment influences later adjustment above and beyond its comorbidity with other forms of malevolent caregiving (e.g., physical or sexual abuse). Working from varying perspectives and in