Untangling the relationship between child maltreatment and criminal behavior: executive functioning as mediator

ABSTRACT

There is evidence that childhood maltreatment (CM) is an important risk factor for adult criminal behavior. However, little is known about the cognitive processes mediating this relationship. This study examined the mediating role of executive functioning (EF) on the relationship between CM and history of criminal behavior on a sample of 334 male individuals in custody from Uruguay. Preliminary results showed that CM was significantly associated with past criminal behavior in all multivariate models. The mediation analysis found that behavioral regulation had a significant mediating role while the metacognition and EF total score did not. Finally, the inhibition domain was the strongest mediator. This suggests that CM is an important risk factor that needs to be considered in Uruguay, and addressing behavioral regulation may also help to address some of the long-term consequences of CM and targeting deficits in inhibition could be a potential target for treatment for individuals that commit criminal offenses.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood maltreatment
• executive functioning
• criminal behavior
• mediation effect

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the director on that time of the Uruguayan Prison System, Ana Juanche, for her trust and support. Additionally, the authors would also like to thank all the individuals who participated in the study, and Victoria Gambetta and Gustavo Medina for their help collecting data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The procedure for handling missing data was guided by the BRIEF-A manual (Roth et al., 2005) which indicates that the protocol is considered invalid and the case should be excluded whenever three conditions are not fulfilled: (a) having less than 15 missing answers in the full scale; (b) having more than 1 missing answers in shift, self-monitor, or task monitor domains; (c) and having more than 2 missing answers in the inhibition, emotional control, initiate, working memory, plan/organize and organization of materials domains. Additionally, all the domain and global indexes were constructed as sum of raw score of items excluding every case that had more 1/3 of missing values.

2 While CM indexes often include questions about sexual abuse, only four respondents in our sample reported any sexual abuse. This item was therefore removed from the scale. Analysis including these cases did not change significantly the present results.

3 The reliability of the nine domains was: inhibition (α = .74), shift (α = .56), emotional control (α = .85), self-monitor (α = .77), initiate (α = .73), working memory (α = .78), plan/organize (α = .69), task monitor (α = .58), organization of materials (α = .77). Shift and Task monitor showed poor reliability (below the 0.6 threshold) which is lower than what is observed in the literature (see Roth et al., 2005). However, most of the studies are based on non-clinical samples and even in these studies the domains that have lower reliability are task monitor and shift (together with inhibition). Additionally, studies that included clinical samples (i.e., hearing problems, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) showed in some of their samples levels of reliability on these domains below 0.7 (Hauser et al., 2013).

4 It was not possible to obtain the criminal records for more than 10% of the sample due to problems in the criminal justice system in Uruguay. Additionally, in Uruguay, the homicide clearance rate is 50% indicating, thus, the weakness and lack of reliability of criminal records (OPP, 2018).

Additional information

Funding

The first author had a postdoctoral scholarship from the National Agency for Research and Innovation (ANII) (Uruguay ). The project was funded by the Sectorial Commission of Scientific Research (FINCSOC_CSIC_38).