EXAMINING THE PREDICTIVE VALIDITY OF THE MALTREATMENT AND ABUSE CHRONOLOGY OF EXPOSURE SCALE ON INTERNALIZING SYMPTOMS

Although childhood maltreatment has been well researched, and there are many assessments of childhood maltreatment, they are fragmented and the Maltreatment and Abuse Chronology of Exposure Scale (MACE) was developed to address this problem, as it captures 10 types of childhood maltreatment along with ages of exposure. Childhood maltreatment, specifically psychological maltreatment, has also been connected to internalizing symptoms of depression and anxiety. This study was developed to examine the predictive validity of the MACE by administering the MACE and a measure of internalizing symptoms, the Depression and Anxiety Stress Scale-21 (DASS-21), to participants and examining the relationships between the scores on the MACE and the DASS-21. Canonical correlation was used to examine the relationships between the MACE subscales and the DASS-21 categories of Depression, Anxiety, and Stress. Scores on the MACE, especially in categories of emotional abuse and neglect, were significantly related to scores of Stress, Anxiety, and Depression. Additionally, responses to the MACE were broken into three categories of early childhood (1-5), middle childhood (6-12), and late childhood (13-18), to examine which categories of abuse would be the most strongly related to internalizing symptoms. The analyses for middle and late childhood were significant and followed the same pattern, with the scales for emotional abuse and neglect being the strongest related to the symptoms of Stress, Anxiety, and Depression. These results provide support for the accuracy of the MACE in capturing many types of childhood maltreatment and can effectively predict scores of internalizing symptoms, and provide support for the use of the MACE in both research and clinical counseling practice.