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This study aimed to investigate the moderating roles of gender and age on emotional abuse within intimate relationships. This study included 250 participants with an average age of 27 years. Participants completed the Emotional Abuse Questionnaire (EAQ; Jacobson & Gottman, 1998), which 4 subscales are isolation, degradation, sexual abuse, and property damage. Multigroup analysis with 2 groups, female (n = 141) and male (n = 109), was used to test the moderation effect. Younger men reported experiencing higher levels of emotional abuse, which declined with age. Older females reported experiencing less emotional abuse than older males. Overall, emotional abuse was more common in younger participants. Younger women experienced higher rates of isolation, and women's overall experience of property damage was higher than that of men and increased with age. Results are interpreted through the social exchange and conflict frameworks.
Keywords: emotional abuse; intimate partner violence; Emotional Abuse Questionnaire (EAQ); isolation; property damage; age
Intimate partner violence (IPV) is considered a human rights violation and public health issue throughout the world (Campbell, 2002; Garcia-Moreno, Jansen, Ellsberg, Heise, & Watts, 2006; Tjaden & Thoennes, 2000). As currently indexed, violent crimes against intimate partners-current or former spouses, boyfriends, and girlfriends-are committed more frequently against women; these include lethal (homicide) and nonlethal (rape, assault) forms (Catalano, 2007). However, abusive behavior does not always involve tangible violence. Distinctions must be made between physical violence/abuse-traditionally, the most researched and detectable form-and emotional or psychological abuse. Emotional abuse is any nonphysical behavior or attitude that is designed to control, subdue, punish, or isolate another person through the use of humiliation or fear (Engel, 2002). This article focuses on this form of abuse while examining its relationships to age and gender.
Emotional abuse can include verbal assault, dominance, control, isolation, ridicule, or the use of intimate knowledge for degradation (Follingstad, Coyne, & Gambone, 2005). It targets the emotional and psychological well-being of the victim, and it is often a precursor to physical abuse. There is a high correlation between physical abuse and emotional abuse in batterer populations (Gondolf, Heckert, & Kimmel, 2002), and verbal abuse early in a relationship predicts subsequent physical spousal abuse (Schumacher & Leonard, 2005).
Thus, there is an emerging emphasis on understanding emotional abuse as a con- struct...