Child Abuse & Neglect 35 (2011) 514–523 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Child Abuse & Neglect Implicit attitudes toward children may be unrelated to child abuse risk  Heather J. Risser a,∗ , John J. Skowronski b , Julie L. Crouch b a University of Illinois at Chicago, USA b Northern Illinois University, USA a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 9 December 2009 Received in revised form 14 October 2010 Accepted 1 February 2011 Keywords: Child physical abuse Attitudes toward children Social information processing Implicit attitudes Evaluative reactions a b s t r a c t Objective: To explore whether adults possess implicit attitudes toward children and whether those attitudes are especially negative among respondents who are high in child physical abuse (CPA) risk. Methods: The present study used an implicit evaluative priming procedure. In this pro- cedure, participants were instructed to make decisions about the evaluative implications of target words. These words were preceded by photographs of child faces or adult faces displaying positive, neutral, or negative expressions. Reaction times for the evaluative deci- sions were used as an index of the extent to which photos invoked negative or positive evaluative reactions. Results: Results from 2 studies, the first conducted on a student sample (N = 90) and the second on a parent sample (N = 95), demonstrated that evaluative congruence between the facial expressions displayed in photographs and the target words facilitated responses. Furthermore, the results suggested that regardless of CPA risk, child faces, relative to adult faces, facilitated responses to negative target words, suggesting an out-group bias. This implicit out-group bias was not moderated by respondents’ CPA risk status. Conclusions: Faces of children, relative to faces of adults, appear to activate negative infor- mation structures that facilitate evaluative decisions of negative stimuli, suggesting an out-group bias. Given that out-group biases typically lead to less favorable treatment of out-group members, additional research is needed to examine the pervasiveness of neg- ative evaluative biases towards children and the potential implications of such biases on children’s lives. Further, research examining whether high CPA risk parents and low CPA risk parents differ in how they manage initial negative evaluative reactions is needed. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. The Social Information Processing (SIP) model of physically abusive parenting (Crouch & Milner, 2005; Milner, 1993, 2000, 2003) describes cognitive processes that direct parenting behavior. In this model, repeated experiences with parent- ing and with child stimuli contribute to the development of parenting knowledge structures called schemata. Schemata include parent–child interaction scripts as well as knowledge about child attributes or characteristics (e.g., Risser, Lovejoy, & Magliano, 2005). Importantly, some schemata are highly accessible, and hence, are more easily activated than others (Bargh & Williams, 2006). These easily activated schemata are especially likely to guide subsequent social information processing, influencing everything from the stimuli to which a parent attends to the behaviors selected in parent–child interactions.  This research was partially supported by an NIMH training grant (MH 019952-08) awarded to Joel S. Milner and was originally conducted as the first author’s doctoral dissertation under the direction of John J. Skowronski and Joel S. Milner. ∗ Corresponding author address: Interdisciplinary Center for Research on Violence, University of Illinois-Chicago MC (141), 1007 W. Harrison St., Chicago, IL 60607-7137, USA. 0145-2134/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.chiabu.2011.02.008