Aim and Background: This study investigates the relationship between emotional neglect and high-risk behaviors in prisoners, focusing on the mediating role of emotion regulation strategies. It aims to understand how early adverse experiences impact prisoners' cognitive and emotional empowerment and their involvement in risky behaviors.
Methods and Materials: The research method is descriptive-correlational. The statistical population of this study consists of all prisoners in Shiraz in 2024. The sample consisted of 409 prisoners in Shiraz who were selected by the Available Sampling Method.  Data were collected using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (Bernstein et al., 2003), Emotion Regulation Strategies (Garnefski et al., 2001), Cognitive Abilities Questionnaire (Nejati, 2013), and Youth Risk Behaviors Scale (Snow et al., 2019). To evaluate the proposed model, structural equation modeling was used using AMOS version 24 and SPSS 27.
Findings: The results of the correlation coefficient showed that there is a negative relationship between emotional neglect and adaptive strategies of cognitive-emotional regulation with risky behaviors (P≤0.05). There is a negative relationship between cognitive abilities and adaptive emotion regulation strategies with risky behaviors(P≤0.05). Also, there is a positive and significant relationship between maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies and high-risk behaviors (P≤0.05). The findings indicate that the proposed model, such as CFI=0.92, IFI=0.92, NFI=0.91, and RMSEA=0.06, is appropriately fit with the data. The results of the structural model showed that 29% of the variance of adaptive strategies of cognitive-emotion regulation and 31% of the variance of maladaptive strategies of Cognitive Abilities and cognitive-emotional regulation are explained by emotional neglect and 60% of the variance of high-risk behaviors is explained by Cognitive Abilities, emotional neglect and adaptive and maladaptive strategies of cognitive-emotional regulation.
Conclusions: According to the results of this study, early intervention and preventive measures in reducing high-risk behaviors as an observable dimension of behavior, and specifically by focusing on interventions based on cognitive restructuring and emotional regulation, can improve an important part of emotional, cognitive, and communication problems caused by undesirable early life experience.