PONE-D-20-32794

What You Say and What I Hear – Investigating Differences in the Perception of the Severity of Psychological and Physical Violence in Intimate Partner Relationships

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Sikström,

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Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. Your paper has been reviewed by two independent reviewers and was found to have several issues of content and format, including aspects related to the conceptualization of seriousness and typographical errors. The topic is appealing to the readership and fills a gap in research knowledge. After considering the reviewers' decisions, this Academic Editor consider that major revisions are needed. Please address the reviewers' recommendations and resubmit for further consideration. The manuscript cannot be considered for publication in its current form. 

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Additional Editor Comments:

Dear authors: Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. Your paper has been reviewed by two independent reviewers and was found to have several issues of content and format, including aspects related to the conceptualization of seriousness and typographical errors. Please address the reviewers' recommendations and resubmit for further consideration. The manuscript cannot be considered for publication in its current form.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: No

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: I Don't Know

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Thank you for the opportunity to review the manuscript entitled, What You Say and What I Hear – Investigating Differences in the Perception of the Severity of Psychological and Physical Violence in Intimate Partner Relationships. The stated purpose of the study was to assess potential perceptual differences in the communication of IPV in heterosexual romantic relationships. The authors stated, "This study focuses on measuring perceptual differences in the communication and perception of violence…To our knowledge these perceptual differences have not been explored…"

1. I applaud the authors for their pioneering work and found the study's aim to be relevant and important.

2. The manuscript would benefit for extensive editing to address several grammatical and spelling errors, beginning with the first sentence in the Introduction, which appears to have a typo, i.e. "A correction evaluation..". The authors may have intended to write "A correct evaluation". Elsewhere, under guidelines, we read, " If you are male rater, or are given evaluations of violence from a male rather, then consider increasing your sensitivity. I believe the authors meant to write "rater" . There are numerous other such examples throughout the manuscript and I encourage the authors to edit their work.

3. There are several sections that would benefit from being more concisely written, which would improve the work's readability. For example, the authors wrote, "According to our hypotheses, we expected to find"… This could have been reduced to "We hypothesized…"

4. I wonder if the relevance of the study would have been enhanced by adding raters who actually work in the criminal justice or legal systems…This is because they are likely to have experience which would inform the severity of their ratings.

5. The following sentence needs to be clarified: "Gender PD exists if the seriousness ratings of violence depend on group belongingness of either the experiencer or the rater".

6. The authors stated, "…Thus, statements about psychological violence can be interpreted in more different ways across situations and individuals compared to physical violence. For instance, sarcasm and irony makes it more difficult for the receiver to fully comprehend the intention of the communicated statement. This leads to lower inter-rater reliability in the evaluation of seriousness of psychological violence".

Please clarify the leap from comprehension of the intention of a communicated statement to inter-rater reliability.

7. I had hoped that the distinction among Situational couple violence ,intimate

Terrorism, and violent resistance would be included in the analysis. For example, were the raters informed of the distinctions among these concepts? Did the authors classify each narrative in these categories in order to determine which categories of violence were rated as higher in severity, either by the "experiencer" or by the rater?

8. Was sexual violence was rated as physical violence in this study. Research indicates that sexual violence adds layers of psychological trauma that raters, in this case, might rate as more severe, especially based on the gender of the victim/survivor.

9. The authors stated, "First, the difficulty of communicating psychological violence may lead to a Calibration PD where psychological violence is perceived as less serious when it is communicated"…

This is an example of where complementary articulation of a study's findings would be enhanced by adding a qualitative component. For example, by selecting a subsample of participants for interviews from which the authors would obtain more detail regarding their experiences of psychological violence.

10. The authors stated,"… psychological violence, being an indirect reinforcer, is more difficult to communicate than physical violence… It is argued that this occurs because psychological violence works as an indirect reinforcer, meaning that psychological violence requires a learning process. This does not apply to physical violence because it is a direct reinforcer…"

There is a great deal of literature that indicates social learning is involved for both perpetrators and victims of IPV-

11. I have no problem with the fact that non-heteronormative persons were excluded from this study. I am just not sure if the reason provided is sufficient, i.e., "The screening of heterosexuality was conducted because we were interested in changing the gender in the collected texts of violence, and we wanted to make sure that this occurred in close relationships consisting of a man and a woman". Trans women, for example, have a deeply felt internalized sense of being a woman.

12. "Upon completion, they received £2.50 for their participation". Please explain how the authors arrived at this sum as an incentive and provide a reference. Under limitations, include a discussion of whether or not this small incentive resulted in the loss of so much data that out of 136 enrolled, the final sample was 71.

13. The authors stated, "The final data comprised of 68 narrations about physical violence and 68 narrations about psychological violence. These narratives were collected from a total of 71 narrators, as some of narrators only produced one narrative and others produced two ".

Were there specific instructions regarding how many narratives were needed or was there a space limitation?

14. From an ethical perspective, what steps were taken to mitigate participants' psychological distress related to recall or re-experiencing adverse events such as physical or psychological violence? Any debriefing? Referral for psychological support as needed?

15. "In Phase 3: If the participants had not experienced any psychological or physical violence, they were instructed to describe a situation that was as close to this violence as possible".

I am not certain that the experience of being slapped, pushed down some stairs, beaten severely or some other direct act of violence correlates with "a situation that was as close to violence as possible".

16. The authors stated, "…This included narrations involving pregnancy (because it would not make sense to have a story with pregnant men) or when pronouns were missing (because gender could not be identified in these narratives)…"

I am confused, here. I thought part of the analysis was done by gender. What happened to narratives for which gender could not be identified? Were they discarded?

17. The authors stated, "An analysis of simple main effects showed that whereas there were no difference in severity ratings for the female narratives in the two versions, but a significant difference in how the male narratives were rated with the stories in the gender reversed condition rated as more severe than those in the original version. This suggests that when a man is exposed to the same physical violence as a woman, he is considerably less likely to be seen as a victim. This effect can not fully be explained by the fact that men possess greater physical strength and are therefore (independent of the evidence) less likely to be victimised by a woman, because this explanation does not account for the fact that the same effect is found for psychological violence".

The question which comes to mind is, aren't men often considered psychologically stronger than women also? Based on neuroimaging studies involving the role of the amygdala in emotional regulation Please see:

Eippert F, Viet R, Weiskopf N, Birbaumer N, Anders S. Regulation of emotional responses elicited by threat-related stimuli. Human Brain Mapping. 2007;28:409–423. [PMC free article] [PubMed]

See also:

McRae, K. et al. The neural bases of distraction and reappraisal. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 22, 248–262 (2010).

18. The authors stated, "One possibility is that psychological violence is harder to communicate because it is based on secondary reinforcement, which may lead to it being harder to detect by the receiver of the information" I think if the authors provide a clearer definition of secondary reinforcement as they are using it, it would clarify their point. ..

19. Under Guidelines, regarding gender, the authors recommend increasing sensitivity but do not indicate how this would be done. Also, please check grammar and typos in this section as well as others.

20. I was concerned about the following wording: "If you are male rater, or are given

evaluations of violence from a male rather (Typo, please edit), then consider increasing your sensitivity, compared to if you are female, or given evaluations from a female rater.

Again, just recommending that someone increases their sensitivity does not constitute a fait accompli; it's more likely to evoke cognitive dissonance. Guidelines need to be accompanied by "how to" instructions.

21. I would omit the entire guidelines from this manuscript, as the intent was not to write a manual. Stick to the purpose of the study. Your topic and findings are important enough.

22. "Guidelines to victims of violence- If you are communicating psychological violence, try to be very clear of whether you find this violence severe, or not. This message may not get across the person you are communicating it to, and it may also be viewed milder than what you feel that it actually was. If you are male, try to emphasize the severity of violence more, the violence made to you may not be taken at face value.

There is so much involved in reporting violence as a victim and so many phases one must go through (See Transtheoretical model of change and IPV), and once the decision is made to report IPV, the reporting itself is traumatic; So, the latter quote can appear as if the authors are engaging in "Victim blaming". I am sure they are not, but rewording that paragraph is important.

Other items that need to be addressed:

• DOIs missing from references

• Lots of grammatical and spelling errors throughout.

• Sometimes, no spaces are left after periods

• Sometimes, extra spaces are left between paragraphs

• Keeping "person" and "voice" consistent in the writing would be helpful. The authors shift from first person plural to third person- and from active to passive voice throughout the manuscript.

Reviewer #2: The authors aimed to examine perceptual discrepancies in narrators’ and receivers’ understanding of the seriousness of IPV. They demonstrate that there are some differences, and notably gender differences, in attributions of seriousness. This study is novel and the notion of perceptual differences has implications for both prevention programs as well as intervention services.

My main concern is the conceptual definition of the main construct, “seriousness.” It is unclear what this concept means. The authors seem to indicate that it is synonymous with severity as they use the terms interchangeably throughout. However, how did the participants interpret the question regarding how “serious” the incident was? Was there a pilot test with a debriefing session for participants prior to this study? There are a lot of interpretations of the construct of seriousness that could pose problems for this study in terms of reliability and what the findings mean. Is it likelihood of acute physical or psychological trauma? Is it long-term health effects? Does it tap into the extent to which the behavior is illegal or the extent to which it should be punished by the criminal justice system? The authors mention Johnson’s typology, is seriousness a reflection of the extent to which participants think that the incident narrative is reflective of a relationship marked with violent coercion compared to deficits in managing anger? With regard to gender differences, one could respond that violence against women incidents are more “serious” because they are embedded in larger structural systems that make economic independence less likely and thus women may be less likely to be able to leave abusive relationships. In sum, information regarding the validity and reliability of the single item indicator of seriousness is needed as it could be open to much interpretation.

The authors report that the sample is from the United States. Perceptions of injury and harm are not only tied to gender, but strongly tied to race. Notably, Black women are consistently perceived to be less impacted by violence, trauma, and health issues. For example, their pain is perceived to be less by health practitioners in hospitals and doctor’s offices. To what extent might these results be influenced by race? Did the vignettes use any names, real or fake, to communicate the gender of the narrator and the assailant? Was the distribution of the race of the narrators and perceivers comparable? It is likely if there were no names used that the perceivers mentally envisioned a scenario with two people of the same race as themselves. If the distributions are comparable, I think that the authors can reasonably conclude that this does not pose an issue, but it should be mentioned in the methods and discussed in the discussion section.

Minor and Miscellaneous

- The authors mainly refer to gender differences, but in the methods they include discussion of sex ratios. The authors report on sexual orientation, but not gender identity. Were all participants cisgendered?

- The authors discuss Johnson’s typology. Although they mention violent resistance, included in his expanded typology is also mutual violent control. Although a minor omission, it is relevant given the emphasis of this study is on gender parity.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Rachael Powers

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Submitted filename: What You Say and What I Hear _REVIEW 11 15 20.docx

What You Say and What I Hear – Investigating Differences in the Perception of the Severity of Psychological and Physical Violence in Intimate Partner Relationships

PONE-D-20-32794R1

Dear Dr. Sikström,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Astrid M. Kamperman

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #2: No