How women with intimate partner violence (IPV) reason about other’s intentions: effect of IPV on counterfactual inferences among healthy high socioeconomic level women from Turkey

Background: Counterfactual thinking (CFT) is a specific type of human thought involving mental representations of alternatives to past situations by perceiving the immediate environment from an imagined perspective. CFT problems and deficits in counterfactual inference ability are related to psychopathologies. Objective: We aimed to assess the CFT in a sample of high sociocultural-healthy women with and without intimate partner violence (IPV) exposure to determine whether exposure to different types of IPV has effects on CFT. Methods: Three hundred thirty-six women recruited the study. Data was collected by Violence Exposure Questionnaire and Counterfactual Inference Test. Results: Compared with non-victims, physical IPV victims significantly generate fewer counterfactual thoughts when faced with a simulated scenario. In addition, the reaction of rumination (judgemental) in response to a temporal nearly happened event was significantly lower among both physical and emotional IPV victims. Among victims, deficits in the CIT is positively correlated with the number of physical, emotional and economic abuses but the degree of correlations were weak. Discussion: We demonstrated that IPV exposure is severe in healthy women at the high socioeconomic level and is associated with the decrease in CFT ability.