The Influence Of Neglect On Executive Function

In recent years,childhood abuse and neglect has attracted more and more attention.Statistics show that neglect is the most common types of childhood abuse with the highest incidence and the widest range.childhood abuse(physical abuse,emotional abuse,and sexual abuse)are guardian behaviors that are unfavorable to the development of children,and have negative impact on the development of children’s physical and mental health.However,there are essential differences: there are different causes,forms,and features.Activeness and violence are the main features of abuse,while passivity,neglect and longterm are the main features of neglect.The main feature of abuse is the imposing of various factors that harmful to the development,while neglect is the lack of various factors which are important to the development.In addition,the ways and results of influences are also different.Therefore,this study believes that neglect is "an entity independent of abuse" and has a special impact on executive function.Numerous studies have taken neglect and abuse as a whole,and found that they are closely related to executive function components such as inhibitory control and working memory.This study will isolate the neglect and explore its impact on executive function separately.At the same time,explore the role of mothers’ reaction to children’s negative emotions between the two.The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of neglect on working memory and inhibitory control of 10-year-old children,and examine the role of mothers’ coping styles between neglect and executive function.In this study,70fourth-grade children from a primary school in Shandong were selected,and 307 fourth-and fifth-grade children and their mothers were selected for the questionnaire survey.The behavioral experiment was used to investigate the two groups’(neglect group and control group)different performances of executive function in "cold" and "hot".The behavioral tasks included Digit Span task,Classic Stop Signal task,Emotional Stop Signal task and Color Word Stroop task.At the same time,this study introduced the variable of the mother’s response to the child’s negative emotions to explore the role of the mother’s coping style in neglect and executive function.Results:(1)neglect group performed worse than the control group in working memory task.(2)The stop signal reaction time(SSRT)of the neglect group was significantly higher than the control group;two groups had significant differences in the negative and neutral emotion SSRT.Neglect had an impact on reaction inhibition under the characterization of "cold" and "hot".(3)There were Stroop effect in the Color Word Stroop task both in the neglect group and the control group,and the effect size of the two groups were significantly different,neglect had negative influence on the development of interference inhibition.(4)The grief and minimization reaction in the mother’s non-supportive reaction,and the emotional concern in the supportive reaction played a moderating role between neglect and executive function,indicating that the mother’s different reactions in the face of children’s negative emotions could exacerbate or buffer the negative impact of neglect on executive function.The results of this study enlighten us: Neglect has negative impact on the development of working memory and inhibitory control,which are the core components of children’s executive function.Caregivers should strengthen their cognition of neglect and avoid the neglect behaviors.At the same time,caregivers should avoid using non-supportive response to treat children’s negative emotions,and should adopt positive and supportive response to help and guide children to express and regulate emotions in order to weaken the negative effects of neglect on children’s executive functions.