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Maltreating carers tend to have more deficits, distortions, biases, and errors in their perceptions of children’s behaviours. They might be less attentive. For example, neglectful parents might fail to see, perceive or hear their children’s distress and attachment needs. Abusive parents might only see the negative things in their child’s behaviour, failing to note instances when the child complies or behaves well. Abusive parents readily perceive and identify noncompliant behaviour. It has also been observed that abusive carers, though likely to notice that their child has an emotional expression on his or her face, are much more likely to misidentify it – an error of coding. This is particularly true if the expression is conveyed at low intensity. For example, a look of surprise might be perceived as a look of dissatisfaction, which is much more likely to trigger a hostile response than one of reassurance.

High-risk parents tend to interpret negative behaviour in children as more serious, wrong and culpable than low-risk parents. They are also more inclined to see these ‘hostile’ behaviours as wilful and deliberate, warranting a heavy disciplinary response.

Maltreating parents are less likely to take mitigating or situational factors into account when interpreting a child’s behaviour. For example, if the family dog knocks into a three year old who has just made a drink, and the drink spills on the carpet, the child is accused of being careless and annoying.

High-risk parents tend to be rather rigid and inflexible in their parenting techniques, including behavioural control and discipline. Their ability to monitor, reflect on and explore the meaning and purpose of a child’s behaviour is limited. They employ the same understandings and techniques in most situations, failing to adapt or develop their responses to the particular situation or circumstance. Maltreating parents are likely to process a range of different parent-child interactions using the same assumptions, understandings and cognitive schemata. This is known as automatic processing. The effect of using the same model or cognitive schema to explain a variety of behaviours is a failure to see or think about the particularities of the situation. Reactions are unreflective and quick. An injured child, an ill child, and a tired child might all be seen as conditions demanding a response, the effect of which is to annoy the parent. The distressed child is immediately told off or disciplined. Abusive and neglectful parents see their child’s personality as fixed and their behaviour as independent of circumstance or situation.

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Parents who show no interest in what they think their infant is thinking and feeling, and who fail to ‘affect mirror’, deny the child information about his or her young mind and how it works. The child cannot find his or her psychological self in the mind of a parent who is not mind-minded. All the child gets when he or she interacts with his mother is her state of mind.

In the case of connecting with the mind of an abusive carer, the child finds hostility towards his or her very existence. In the mind of a neglectful carer, the child finds only the thinnest of mental representations of the self and its needs – a virtual blank.

Thus, the only information about how to experience the self is the parent’s own thoughts and feelings towards the infant. The child therefore begins to internalize and represent this ‘alien’, non-mirrored view of self as a core part of him or herself. However, this ‘alien’ self bears no relation to the child’s own affect and cognitive states. So children of abusive carers internalize a hostile, persecutory self. Those of severely neglectful parents internalize a hollow, empty, abandoned self.

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Caregivers who are unwilling (avoidant patterns) or unable (ambivalent patterns) to respond to or satisfy a child’s normally expressed attachment needs create anxiety and insecurity in the parent-child relationship. In order to increase parental responsivity, children unconsciously learn that they cannot display attachment behaviour in its full, rounded and unabridged form. Instead, they develop secondary attachment behavioural strategies. By suppressing their primary attachment strategy, children reorganize their attachment behaviour in an attempt to recover parental availability and interest. If the strategy works, the child has a way of relating to the parent, and increasing the amount of care and protection available. The child then experiences a ‘secondary felt security’. The feelings and behaviour associated with that strategy also becomes the preferred state of mind in which to be, that is to say, in which the individual feels most secure.

Children who develop avoidant attachments adapt to ‘rejecting’ caregiving by downplaying and inhibiting their feelings of need. They over-regulate their emotions. They ‘consistently omit negative affect from mental processing and behaviour’. In effect, they deactivate their attachment behaviour as a way of increasing parental proximity, acceptance, responsivity and availability. They therefore increase parental availability when they downplay attachment behaviour and conduct themselves as they believe the parent would prefer them to behave. Their anxiety is that any display of need, longing, vulnerability and emotion might drive away their caregiver.

In the case of ambivalent children, attachment behaviour appears not to predict parental availability. It is difficult for the child to build up any sense or consistent picture of how his or her behaviour affects others or brings about desired change. The responsivity of the carer is governed largely by her needs and feelings, not those of the child. The responses of the carer appear not to be contingently connected to the child’s internal mental states, anxieties or attachment behaviour. Ambivalent children, and indeed ambivalent adults, therefore have little confidence in how their own behaviour might affect the behaviour of others. Only when ambivalent individuals are in a state of heightened arousal (hyperactivated attachment) do they feel that others are likely to take notice and attend. There is an anxious need to feel recognized and loved. Relationships are therefore craved, although they provoke anxiety and anger. Inasmuch as this demanding state does increase other people’s involvement, no matter whether positive or negative, it reduces the fear of feeling alone and abandoned.

Because deactivated (avoidant) and hyperactivated (ambivalent) attachment strategies increase the availability of the attachment figure, they are described as ‘organized’ attachment patterns. These ‘organized’ attachment strategies allow individuals to stay connected to and in relationship with other people, including their attachment figure.”