Margaret Blake

Sexual Abuse and Intimacy: the Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse Upon Processingintimacy-related Stimuli Margaret Blake

Adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse suffer amultitude of long-term effects, including distortedideas about sexuality, inappropriate sexualizedbehaviors, fragmented identity, and feelings ofpowerlessness and betrayal (Olafson & Boat, 2000). Victimization influences an individual'sself-concept, is associated with increased use ofimage-distorting defenses such as dissociation, denial, and projective identification, and increasesthe likelihood of future abuse. The current studysought to explore the cycle of abuse by examiningimplicit and explicit measures of intimacy amongfemale inpatient and university participants. Allparticipants completed a modified version of theAdult Dimensions Inventory (Chaffin, Wherry, Newlin, Crutchfield, & Dykman, 1997) in an effort to assessexperience of childhood sexual abuse, and threeversions of the Stroop Task: Neutral, General Threat, and Intimacy-Related. The university participantsalso completed the Experiences in Close RelationshipsScale (ECR; Brennan et al., 1998), a self-reportmeasure of attachment-related anxiety and avoidance. Results showed that a more intrusive form of sexualabuse led to a significant impact upon the cognitiveprocessing of emotion-laden and neutral stimuli. This impact, however, manifested differently forinpatient and university participants: sexuallyabused inpatient participants tended to avoidprocessing information while abused universityparticipants were distracted by emotion-ladenstimuli. Finally, results showed that within theuniversity sample there was a greater discrepancybetween implicit and explicit measures of intimacyamong sexually abused participants compared tonon-abused participants.