UC Riverside

Dissociative processes in children and adolescents entail alterations in memory, identity, and perception that reflect and/or precipitate disconnects across biological, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral systems. Children of maltreatment survivors are at heightened risk for various forms of psychopathology, including problematic dissociation. However, given that most parents who were maltreated as children do not go on to maltreat their own children, these intergenerational effects may be mediated by more subtle parenting processes that thwart children’s emergent capacities for self-regulation and integration, such as caregivers’ reduced ability to reflect on child needs and behaviors and insensitive caregiving practices characterized by hostility, intrusiveness, and low support.

Drawing on five data waves with a diverse sample of 250 maternal caregiver-child dyads (50% female children, 88.8% nonwhite, 36.7% poverty), this dissertation examined intergenerational effects of caregiver history of maltreatment on children’s dissociation trajectories from early childhood through the transition to adolescence. Further, I evaluated explanatory simple and sequential mediation paths wherein I hypothesized that the severity of a caregiver’s history of maltreatment would predict higher levels of child dissociation at age 6 and slower declines in dissociation from ages 6 to 12 via lower caregiver reflectiveness and more insensitive caregiving. Further exploratory analyses tested these pathways separately for girls and boys.

A factor of curves (FOCUS) model provided a multivariate representation of children’s dissociation starting values and change over time as reported by teachers, caregivers, and examiners at ages 6, 8, 10 and 12. In line with study hypotheses, insensitive caregiving in the wake of maltreatment emerged as an initiating factor for children's dissociation. However, contrary to hypotheses, a history of maltreatment was positively associated with caregiver reflectiveness. In turn, reflectiveness predicted less insensitive caregiving and a resilient pattern wherein children’s dissociation scores began relatively low in early childhood and remained more stable across middle childhood as compared to children with less reflective and more insensitive caregivers. This dissertation has important implications for future research and applied efforts to mitigate intergenerational maltreatment effects and promote children’s resilience to the development of pathological dissociation.