Meeting a lot of physically aggressive and violent partners in your search for love?
Psychiatric Quarterly published a study that attempts to explain the violence and shed more light into the matter.
The study particularly hinted a strong link between babyhood physical abuse and violence in adult dating, and in so doing discredited spanking as cause.
Though spanking, as a method of child discipline, is doomed by the American Psychological Association, wording on non-abusive spanking is unclear.
Though past research has tied spanking to negative effects, other scholars have seen incomplete proof of its undesirable outcomes.
Christopher J. Ferguson, lead author of the research, clarifies that this confusion may be because previous researchers have failed to differentiate between the outcomes of spanking and those of a more intense physical abuse.
The expert focused specifically on a 2018 research that released puzzling results. The researchers of the controversial study (Temple & associates 2018)) claimed that spanking, but not intensive child-age child abuse, led to dating violence in adulthood.
Ferguson found this link so mystifying that he resorts to a similar study (in terms of methodology and analysis) of the 2018 case, but with a different sample.
His samples were made of 509 young adults who averaged at 21 years and were either in an ongoing relationship or had been in an affair in the previous year. Interviewees filled questionnaire prompting them to respond to questions concerning their life as a child and existing relationships.
Fascinatingly, the findings of Ferguson’s research were different than the 2018 results by Temple. The author and his team confirmed that experiencing physical abuse as a child contributed to dating violence in adulthood, but spanking did not.
Nevertheless, further analysis revealed that in the absence of the effects of physical abuse, spanking was seen as the cause of adulthood aggression. According to Ferguson, even in instances where spanking is tied to adulthood relationship aggression, childhood abuse is responsible for the relationship between the two.
The Verdict
Ferguson’s findings lend credence to the idea that babyhood physical abuse leads to aggression in grownups, more than spanking does.
And even in instances where we associate spanking to such outcomes, we are most likely to find that the level of aggression involved was comparable to physical abuse.
Author Bio: Blair Thomas has been a music producer, bouncer, screenwriter, and for over a decade has been the proud Co-Founder of eMerchantBroker, the highest-rated online dating merchant account provider in the country. He has climbed in the Himalayas, survived a hurricane, and lived on a gold mine in the Yukon. He currently calls Thailand his home with a lifetime collection of his favorite books.