A Qualitative Study of Children's Accounts of Cruelty to Animals: Uncovering the Roles of Trauma, Exposure to Violence, and Attachment.

This might suggest that although children could struggle with animal emotional attribution, animals were perhaps seen as less hostile or threatening. Some children had interpretation biases, consistently interpreting images either negatively (three children) or struggling to interpret scenes at all (two children). Furthermore, when children were separated into “cruelty” and “at-risk” groups, there was an interesting trend that suggested children in the cruelty group interpreted images more negatively than the at-risk group, although the sample size was far too small to yield significant results, especially without a control group.

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