03:46AM

–a child who receives inconsistent or harsh caregiving has difficulty predicting the consequences of his/her behavior and this may be manifest in deficits in processing emotional information. For example, maltreated children have been found to show specific deficits in understanding, recognizing, and expressing emotion and are at risk for exhibiting social delays, deficits in empathy, and decreased engagement in prosocial behavior. These findings reveal general deficits in emotion processing in maltreated children, but the question remains about whether these deficits would persist into adulthood.