Intimate partner violence is a serious health problem in the United States, affecting as many as 6 million women annually (Browne, 1993; Straus & Gelles, 1986). When these assaults are reported to the police, the perpetrator usually escapes prosecution by attending one of the many battering intervention programs that have proliferated in the community. Unfortunately, these interventions, founded on ideology and clinical intuition, have been shown to be relatively ineffective at preventing further assault (Babcock, Green & Robie, under review). The goal of this proposed study is to provide basic research into the emotional reactivity of batterers that may guide the development of new, targeted intervention strategies. The proposed research investigates correlates of emotional reactivity among men who physically abuse their partners. Based on a synthesis of two typologies of batterers (Gottman et al., 1995; Holtzworth-Munroe & Stuart, 1994), autonomic reactivity, severity of violence, and dimensions of borderline and antisocial personality features will be examined within 3 groups: a low-level violent sample, a severely violent sample, and a comparison group of distressed/nonviolent men. In this study we assess autonomic reactivity during 3 emotional, interpersonal tasks: 1) a facial affect recognition task, 2) a standardized anger induction, 3) a naturalistic conflict discussion with the partner. A fourth task will assess attention to a non-emotional stimulus. The proposed research is guided by three specific aims: 1. To test for specific correlates of emotional reactivity among batterers with different levels of intimate partner abuse. 2. To disentangle the measurement difficulties inherent in categorical typologies of batterers by examining physiological reactivity and personality disorder features as continuous measures in order to identify which features of borderline and antisocial personality disorder are related to emotional hypo- or hyper-reactivity. Ultimately, this basic research may inform the development of novel assessment tools and treatments for domestic violence perpetrators. We anticipate a) finding basic physiological differences among men who evidence specific personality disorder features which may elucidate differential treatment needs, and b) developing new, useful measures to assess dimensions of important personality features in applied treatment settings.
