Adult Perpetrated Animal Abuse: The Role of Maladaptive Emotion Regulation
Abstract
Animal abuse is a prevalent form of aggressive behaviour that inflicts pain and suffering onto animals and families alike. Despite this, research and theory focusing on the motivations for such behaviour appear to be sparse and limited in development when compared to other types of offending behaviour, such as interpersonal violence. The current thesis investigates the general hypothesis that maladaptive emotion regulation facilitates animal abuse perpetrated by adults. We focus on two specific emotion regulation styles that have been implicated in existing literature; that is, the mis-regulation and under-regulation of emotions. Based on existing research and theories, this thesis explores the facilitative role emotion regulation plays in the perpetration of animal abuse. In this thesis, a new conceptual framework is presented, based on an existing process model of emotion (Gross, 1998), elucidating the role of adopting different emotion regulation strategies in animal abuse perpetration. Studies 1 and 2 explore the sociodemographic and psychological factors (i.e., self/emotion-regulation) identified in the existing literature in animal abusers, violent offenders, and non-offenders. Study 3 is a qualitative exploration of emotion regulation throughout the offence process. Participants who indicated they had engaged in animal abuse behaviours twice or more were asked to describe their thoughts, feelings and emotions throughout the perpetration of the abuse. Study 4 presents…
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