Abuse an example of concept creep

psychological inquiry

The main contention of this article is that in recent decades the meanings of several of psychology’s key concepts have changed in a systematic way. I argue that those changes have targeted particular kinds of concept and moved in a particular direction. Specifically, it is psychology’s negative concepts—those that refer to undesirable, harmful, or pathological aspects of human experience and behavior—that had meaning changes, and these changes have consistently expanded those meanings. The concepts denoted at an earlier time, but they now also refer to a horizontally and vertically enlarged range of additional phenomena. This semantic inflation is not widely appreciated by psychologists. When it has been noted it has been discussed in relation to a single concept, and the general pattern has been missed. In the body of the article I illustrate the “concept creep” hypothesis by reviewing changes in six concepts drawn from the provinces of developmental, clinical, and social psychology: abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice After presenting these six case studies, I examine the causes and implications of the changes they illustrate. I argue that a good explanation of concept creep must account for why the changes are specific to negative concepts and why they involve expansion rather than contraction. It should also encompass both vertical and horizontal expansion and account for the consistency of the effect across diverse concepts rather than explaining each change on its own terms. Explanations that invoke technological, social, and cultural developments are entertained, as are some that implicate psychology as a discipline. I then discuss the wider consequences of concept creep. As Hacking argued, changes in human kind concepts alter social reality, looping back into how people understand themselves and one another and bringing new kinds of people into existence through what he called “dynamic nominalism” (Hacking, 1986). I am at pains not to present concept creep as unambiguously desirable or undesirable, or to write it off as arbitrary or unwarranted. Conceptual revision is to be expected in view of changing scientific and social realities, and it may be appropriately responsive to those changes. Although many critics have held psychological concepts responsible for damaging cultural trends—such as supposed cultures of fear, therapy, and victimhood—the conceptual shifts I present have some positive implications. Nevertheless, they also have potentially damaging ramifications for society and for psychology that cannot be ignored. Case Study 1: Abuse The concept of abuse has grown in prominence within psychology and related fields, largely through the growing awareness that maltreatment of children and adults, and its implications for mental health, has been underestimated in the past. This underestimation goes back at least as far as Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory of hysteria. Decades of research have established the disturbing high prevalence of their causal role in a variety of mental disorders. Hacking (1991) has written at length about the shifting understandings of abuse and the relevance of looping effects to those shifts. He documented the malleability of ideas of child abuse and how these were shaped by cultural trends, legal institutions, and social movements such as feminism and children’s rights activism. However, his historical study primarily addresses changes in professional and popular representations of abuse from the 19th century through to the 1970s and does not focus specifically on psychology. My emphasis here is on more recent changes in the definition of abuse within that field. Classic psychological investigations of abuse recognized two forms, physical and sexual. Physical abuse involved the intentional infliction of bodily harm, whereas sexual abuse involved inappropriate sexual contact, including penetrative sex or nonpenerative molestation. Childhood exposure to these forms of abuse was found to increase vulnerability to adult psychopathology, relationship difficulties, and physical ill health. Three changes to the conceptualization of abuse that have occurred within the psychological literature over recent decades represent clear cases of horizontal expansion. First, “emotional abuse” (Thompson &amp; Kaplan, 1996)—sometimes labeled “psychological abuse”—was introduced as a new abuse subtype. It refers to forms of maltreatment that need not involve bodily contact, unlike physical and sexual abuse, but includes verbal aggression and other behavior that is domineering, intimidating, threatening, rejecting, degrading, possessive, inconsistent, or emotionally unresponsive. This form of abuse was commonly studied within intimate domestic relationships. This new focus on behavior exchanged between adults represents a second horizontal extension of the abuse concept from its traditional focus on the behavior of adults toward children. A third horizontal extension of the abuse concept is its incorporation of neglect. Neglect implies a lack of appropriate care and concern, as when negligent parents fail to tend to their children’s basic needs for food, shelter, clothing, physical contact, and affection. In the early literature on child maltreatment, neglect and abuse were traditionally considered separately—the field’s flagship journal, which commenced publication in 1976, was entitled Child Abuse and Neglect—but increasingly neglect has been understood as a form of abuse. Cicchetti and Barnett’s (1991) taxonomy of child abuse, for example, considers physical neglect as one of its subtypes. Similarly, Goldsmith and Freyd (2005) considered emotional neglect, or “emotional unavailability,” to be a form of emotional abuse. Emotional abuse and neglect as abuse are ideas that represent horizontal extensions of the abuse concept. The former extends abuse into the realm of non  physical harm, where damage is done indirectly through language or social interaction. The latter extends the abuse concept by including acts of omission. Whereas physical and sexual forms of abuse represent the commission of undesirable acts toward a victim, neglect involves the failure to commit desirable acts. Neglect, like physical or sexual abuse, can be an act in the sense of being deliberate, but it differs from these prototypes of abuse by referring to inaction. The inclusion of emotional abuse and neglect within a broadened concept of abuse may also represent a vertical expansion of that concept. Emotional abuse encompasses some forms of interpersonal treatment that are more diffuse and ambiguous than those that fall within the realms of physical and sexual abuse, which, because they require bodily con  tact, are intrinsically more tangible. Determining what counts as emotional abuse may have a larger element of subjectivity. Whether a particular interaction represents humiliation or teasing, possessiveness or protectiveness, and aggressiveness or assertiveness may be uncertain and the parties involved may have very different perceptions. If deciding whether emotional abuse has occurred depends on the self identified victim’s perception, abuse can be invoked as a description that might seem innocuous from an independent observer’s standpoint. This reliance on highly subjective impressions is a feature of some methods of assessing abuse, as in the following item from a popular self report measure: “As a child, did you feel unwanted or emotionally neglected?” A similar vertical expansion of the abuse concept can result when it incorporates neglect. Because criteria for judging omissions (i.e., what was not done that should have been) tend to be less concrete than those for judging commissions (i.e., what was done that should not have been), the boundary of neglect is indistinct. As a consequence, the concept of neglect can become overinclusive, identifying behavior as negligent that is substantially milder or more subtle than other forms of abuse. This is not to deny that some forms of neglect are profoundly damaging, merely to argue that the concept’s boundaries are sufficiently vague and elastic to encompass forms that are not severe. This brief discussion of abuse reveals that the concept’s meaning has undergone significant inflation, horizontal and vertical. Its message is well captured by Furedi (2006), who noted a “continuous expansion of the range of human experiences which can be labelled as abusive,” such that “neglect and unintended insult become equated with physical violence and incorporated into an all purpose generic category ” (p. 86).</div>