Kentucky Certified Nurse Aide (CNA) Practice Test

Psychological abuse is about harming someone’s emotional well-being through threats, intimidation, and manipulation. When a caregiver or someone else humiliates, isolates, or controls a person, it erodes the person’s self-esteem and sense of safety, even though no physical injury occurs. This form of abuse focuses on mental and emotional harm—patterns of behavior that frighten, demean, or isolate the resident over time. Verbal abuse involves harmful words, but the essential element here is the ongoing emotional manipulation and threats that affect how the person feels and thinks. Physical abuse targets the body, and domestic violence is a broader term for abuse within intimate relationships that can include psychological abuse, but the described behavior is best identified as psychological abuse because the harm is emotional rather than physical.