Associations between childhood maltreatment and emotion processing biases in major depression: results from a dot-probe task

Abstract

BackgroundChildhood maltreatment is considered an important risk factor for the development of major depression. Research indicates an association between childhood adversity and altered emotion processing. Depression is characterized by mood-congruent cognitive biases, which play a crucial role in symptom persistence and recurrence. However, whether attentional biases in adult major depression are associated with experienced childhood neglect or abuse remains unclear.MethodsA sample of 45 patients suffering from major depression were recruited to examine correlations between maltreatment experienced during childhood and attentional biases to sad and happy facial expressions. Attention allocation was assessed using the dot-probe task and a history of childhood maltreatment was measured by means of the 25-item Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ).ResultsOur results indicate an association between childhood maltreatment and sustained attention toward sad facial expressions. This relationship was not confounded by severity of symptoms, age, verbal intelligence or more recent stressful experiences.ConclusionsOur findings confirm the hypothesis that a mood-congruent bias in emotion processing observed in major depression is related to early traumatic experiences.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12888-015-0501-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Ontological insecurity II: Relationship to attachment, childhood trauma, and subclinical psychotic‐like experiences

“…There is also a Minimization–Denial subscale (Bernstein et al, ). Cronbach's α is strong and consistently excellent for the three Abuse subscales ranging from 0.81 to 0.94 (Forde et al, ; Gunther et al, ; Jiang et al, ). Although the internal consistency of the two Neglect subscales has fluctuated more markedly, ranging from 0.61 to 0.91 (Forde et al, ; Gunther et al, ; Jiang et al, ; Paivio & Cramer, ; Spinhoven et al, ), α's at the lower end of this range are considered acceptable (Taber, ).…”

“…The 28-item CTQ-SF has been translated into several languages and is a well-validated and widely used measure of childhood trauma and neglect within both clinical and nonclinical populations (Bernstein et al, 2003;Gunther, Dannlowski, Kersting, & Suslow, 2015;Jiang et al 2018;Scher, Stein, Asmundson, McCreary, & Forde, 2001;Spinhoven et al 2014;Thombs, Bernstein, Lobbestael, & Arntz, 2009). The instrument consists of five clinical subscales confirmed reliably by factor analysis: Physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical neglect, and emotional neglect (Forde, Baron, Scher, & Stein, 2012;Paivio & Cramer, 2004;Spinhoven et al, 2014;Thombs et al 2009).…”

Borderline Personality Disorder and Automatic Processing of Valence and Self-Other Relevance Information

“…It is a limitation of the present study that healthy controls were not assessed with the SCID-II. Future research on valence and relevance priming in BPD (and other mental disorders) may take into consideration experiences of childhood maltreatment as an important factor influencing automatic emotion processing [52,53]. …”

Developmental history and stress responsiveness are related to response inhibition, but not judgement bias, in a cohort of European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris)

“…These biases are not restricted to clinically diagnosed disorders, but are also found in individuals with sub-clinical symptoms and those in remission (Everaert et al 2017), suggesting that judgement biases index chronic negative affect. There is some evidence that adverse childhood experiences are specifically linked to the negative cognitive biases found in depression (Günther et al 2015). …”