Validation of the Moral Injury Construct for Family Aggression Perpetration
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Taverna, Emily
- Graduate Program:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 26, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Steffany Fredman, Outside Unit & Field Member
Amy Marshall, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Aaron Pincus, Major Field Member
Christopher Cameron, Major Field Member
Kristin Buss (she/her), Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- domestic violence
morals
cognition
emotion
aggression
abuse
violence - Abstract:
- Moral injury research has been predominantly conducted among military veterans and cross-sectional to date. Yet, moral injury may be a relevant construct for understanding family aggression perpetration and how it reoccurs overtime. In Chapter 2, I use classical test theory analyses across two studies of undergraduate students and two studies of community samples to develop a measure of moral distress following IPV perpetration that assesses thoughts about the actions, thoughts about the self due to one’s actions, and emotions experienced due to one’s actions. The final measure includes three subscales consisting of five items each. Results demonstrate support for internal consistency and test-retest reliability, convergent, discriminant, and incremental validity, and factor structure. In Chapter 3, I present results from a study of 243 participants from 137 cohabiting community couples who completed repeated interviews regarding incidents of family aggression. I conducted multilevel generalized linear regression models to examine how moral cognitions and emotions following one personally severe incident of aggression predicted the amount of subsequent aggression. Results suggested that within-person, greater incident-level moral cognitions predicted greater subsequent aggression and that this interacted with incident-level moral emotions, with this association being more pronounced when trait-level negative cognitions about the self due to aggression perpetration were elevated. Those who tended to have stronger emotional responses to incidents of aggression also tended to engage in more aggression on average. Results were generally consistent for psychological and physical aggression and for men and women. However, incident-level moral cognitions played a more prominent role in predicting subsequent intimate partner aggression (IPA), but parent to child aggression (PCA) was dependent on both moral cognitions and emotions. Overall, results provide further evidence for moral injury theory and indicate that moral responses may be important to understanding family aggression perpetration and how the behavior may reoccur.