The social information processing model in child physical abuse and neglect: A meta-analytic review

Background: Child maltreatment has been recently examined from a cognitive-behavioral perspective. The Social Information Processing (SIP) model specifies how parental cognitions can be associated with child physical abuse and neglect and suggests that maltreating parents do not adequately respond to the child's needs due to errors/bias in the cognitive processing of child-related information. Objective: This study provides two separate meta-analytic reviews of research exploring the role of parents’ socio-cognitive variables in shaping child physical abuse and child neglect, identifying the association of each SIP stage to these types of maltreatment. Method: After a four-phase systematic literature search based in PRISMA with inter-judges’ agreement, 130 effect sizes were extracted from the 51 studies selected. Results: Overall, the effect sizes of the four cognitive stages of the model were significant for physical abuse and ranged from small (r = .190 for parents’ interpretations of children's signals) to moderate (r = .315 for parents’ perceptions of children's signals). Regarding neglect, only the overall effect of parent's preexisting schemata was significant but small in magnitude (r = .231). Conclusions: The results of these multilevel meta-analyses support the general hypothesis that physically abusive parents may incur in biases in processing child-related information, but further research is still required regarding neglect. Theoretically this work is likely to provide a more solid framework to understand parental cognitions underlying child maltreatment with potential implications for evaluation and intervention with maltreating or at-risk parents.