Peer-reviewed article
Gender-specific co-developmental trajectories of emotional maltreatment among children: Relations to traditional bullying.
Linyan Chen, E Scott Huebner, Lili Tian ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study tracked 2,080 Chinese fourth-grade children over two years to understand how emotional abuse and neglect develop together and relate to bullying. Children were measured five times at six-month intervals on their experiences of emotional maltreatment and both bullying perpetration and victimization. The research found distinct patterns of emotional maltreatment that differed between boys and girls, with certain groups at much higher risk for bullying involvement. Boys showed stronger connections between patterns of emotional maltreatment and bullying compared to girls.
Key points
- Four distinct trajectories of emotional maltreatment were identified for boys, with 51.13% in a low-decreasing pattern and 9.14% in a high-stable emotional neglect group
- Three trajectories emerged for girls, with 70.55% in a low-decreasing pattern and 9.17% showing increasing emotional abuse
- Children with moderate-increasing emotional maltreatment patterns showed the highest risk for both bullying perpetration and victimization in both genders
- Boys demonstrated stronger associations between emotional maltreatment trajectories and bullying involvement than girls
- The study emphasizes that interventions to reduce bullying should be tailored differently for boys and girls and target specific at-risk subgroups
Limitations
The study only includes Chinese fourth-grade children, limiting generalizability to other ages, countries, and cultural contexts. The analysis is observational and cannot establish causality; we cannot determine whether emotional maltreatment causes bullying, bullying causes maltreatment, or whether both stem from other factors.
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Emotional maltreatment (i.e., emotional abuse and emotional neglect) correlates significantly with traditional bullying perpetration and victimization in children; however, little is known about the co-developmental trajectories of these two forms of emotional maltreatment and their relations to traditional bullying. OBJECTIVE: This study examined gender-specific trajectories of emotional abuse and emotional neglect through parallel process latent class growth modeling and their relations to traditional bullying perpetration and victimization. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING: The baseline sample included 2080 fourth-grade Chinese elementary school children (55.3% boys; Mage = 10.18, SD = 0.60). METHODS: Participants completed assessments of emotional abuse, emotional neglect, traditional bullying perpetration, and victimization on five occasions, with six-month intervals between assessments. RESULTS: Four trajectories were identified for boys: congruently low-decreasing (51.13%), low-decreasing emotional abuse & moderate-stable emotional neglect (28.76%), congruently moderate-increasing (10.97%), and low-stable emotional abuse & high-stable emotional neglect (9.14%). For girls, three trajectories were revealed: congruently low-decreasing (70.55%), low-stable emotional abuse & moderate-stable emotional neglect (20.28%), and moderate-increasing emotional abuse & moderate-stable emotional neglect (9.17%). Children in the congruently moderate-increasing group for boys and the moderate-increasing emotional abuse & moderate-stable emotional neglect group for girls showed the highest risk for traditional bullying perpetration and victimization. Compared with girls, boys exhibited a stronger relation between the trajectories of emotional maltreatment and traditional bullying. CONCLUSION: Findings elucidated statistically significant relations between the gender-specific trajectories of emotional maltreatment and traditional bullying, emphasizing the importance of differing interventions for subgroups to mitigate traditional bullying.
Findings the Hub has extracted
Each claim below is labelled by its type of design and links back to this report.
- Intervention
- No intervention was tested; this is an observational longitudinal study examining the natural development of emotional maltreatment and its relations to bullying
- Population
- 2,080 fourth-grade Chinese elementary school children (55.3% boys; mean age 10.18 years)
Key finding
Four trajectories identified for boys; three for girls, with different prevalence rates
Chen et al. · PubMed (US National Library of Medicine) · 28 Aug 2026