Background
The "Aggression and Family" Research Unit is located in the Department of Basic Psychology, Faculty of Psychology (University of Valencia). It was created by Prof. M. Cerezo Angeles in 1990 since then different researchers at different stages of training and professors have been part of it. The Unit has received Distinguished Visiting lecturers like Prof. Robert G. Wahler of the University of Tennessee in 1991 and Prof. Joel R. Milner, of the Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, 1994 and also maintains a relationship with Prof. Tom Dishion from the Oregon Social Learning Center, who was Director of Child & Family Institute at the University of Oregon and is currently a professor at Arizona State University. There are also, connections with University College Dublin (UCD) in Ireland and Prof. Eilis Hennesey, Director of the School of Psychology, where Prof. Cerezo has an honorary Visiting Professor appointment for 5 years. These links have enabled different team members during their training period to spend time at the centers of these researchers.
Recently, Prof. Patricia Alvarenga from the University of Bahia in Brazil has completed a stay of one year funded by her national government to apply our coding and analysis techniques to her longitudinal study of childhood socialization. The Unit has also received for period between three months and one year USA undergraduate and graduate students with Fulbright and Whittle Scholarships.
Objectives
The Research Unit was established around the research program whose core is the “relational matrix” constituted by family members (in particular the parent-child dyad). Within this microsocial nucleus where interaction profiles and patterns develop there are two main areas to study:
a) The parenting, that can be analyzed in terms of their sensitivity, consistency or coherence with the child’s behaviors and also in terms of competent parental practices and skills.
b) Child behavior that will manifest in accordance to the child's age and the developmental tasks achieved. In infancy this is reflected in the quality of attachment, as the mental representation of the history of interaction with the primary caregiver. In pre-school and school-aged children, the child’s behaviors may be considered as adaptive (or pro-social) and maladaptive (or anti-social) behaviors.
From a microsocial perspective, the behavior of the different interactors can serve as a stimulus and consequences for the subsequent conduct of the other interactors. In turn, this relational microsystem may be influenced by other variables which function as distal stimuli. These broader context factors are different in nature, and are related to the fact that they represent stressors for different family members: family conflict, sibling conflict, emotional and affective, socio-economic problems, addictions, etc. Furthermore, these variables also represent risk factors for the development of anti-social behavior and child abuse.
The main objectives of our research work, which have extensive empirical support, are as follows:
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To determine the interactive profile that helps to distinguish between abusive and non-abusive parents. A central part of this objective was to study interactive factors associated with the formation and maintenance of parent-child coercive relations in the context of social interaction at home. In particular the factor of mother’s inconsistency or indiscriminate behavior to child behavior has been the focus of a great deal of work.
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Another objective relates to identifying competent, or appropriate, parental practices in their various dimensions: cognitive, affective and behavioral; likewise, the different strategies aimed at promoting the use of competent parenting skills
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The third objective is aimed at tracking, in the territory of early mother-child interaction, the development of asynchronous patterns in their relation with the quality of attachment and its medium-term effects on coercive family processes. An important factor in the breakdown of reciprocity and continuity in flow of the early relationship appears to be associated with maternal insensitivity to the child’s signals which, in turn, can be affected by life stressors and other factors. A central point is to detect mother-infant interactive patterns that can work as predictors of child attachment. This requires developing new ways to capture the maternal in/sensitivity concept.
The three objectives above have been developed through FOUR three-year research projects funded by The National Scientific and Technical Research (DGICYT), conducted between 1992 and 2009, which is the basic research section of the Research Unit.
Transference of Knowledge and Research Results
There has been a sustained and intensive effort to transfer knowledge and results from basic research.
Area of treatment of families with problems of child abuse (school-aged children):
The intervention methodology applied on a set of 25 families was published in a book, available on this website (Cerezo, 1992) and a number of Case Studies were published in national and international journals. This methodology was spread in courses and in a 2 year Master of the University of Valencia for psychologists working in Social Services. Many psychologists working in the Services for Children and Families (SEAFI) that were created in Valencia in 2002 were directly or indirectly influenced by this work.
Area of welfare and promoting good parenting practices in early childhood:
The Programa de Apoyo Psicológico P/Materno-Infantil © PAPMI (Cerezo, 1990) was developed and its pilot study was funded by the Regional Government. The PAPMI is a social innovation project, pioneering and ahead of its time, in which have participated more than 3000 babies with their parents in Spain have participated. The PAPMI is a service that addresses the entire population of newborns in a given area and aims to support the process of parenting and the interactive relationship with babies to promote the development of a secure attachment, a resilience factor to subsequent psychological adjustment of the individual. The recognition of interest as a social innovation initiative was given by the institutional support given by the University of Valencia to promote the creation of a spin-off company Instituto Psicológico de la Infancia y la Familia (IPINFA) [Child and Family Psychological Institute], appointed by the University of Valencia Board of Governors in March 6, 2007.
The presentation of PAPMI results in various international fora led the Irish Health Service Executive (HSE; prior Health Board) the national health and social service agency in Ireland to request the Program for an area of the city of Dublin. The Parent-Child Psychological SupportTM (PCPS) program, PAPMI’s sister program, was implemented in 2001 by the author who traveled to Dublin for a year for this purpose. The PCPS, like the PAPMI can be regarded as an evidence-based program. Since December 2009, is part of an ambitious Community Change Initiative: Youngballymun Project in another area of Dublin, where the PCPS, in 2010 and 2011, has received 79% of all residents born in the catchment area. To date more than a thousand babies with their parents have participated (www. pcpsparenting.org).
A new program inspired by, and adapted from, PAPMI and PCPS is to be applied in a “favela” in the city of Bahia in Brazil, within an international inter-university project, funded by the Brazilian Government and coordinated by Prof. Patricia Alvarenga who had a one-year stay in the Unit Research in 2012/2013.
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