Humans are strongly dependent upon social resources for allostasis and emotion regulation. This applies especially to early childhood because humans—as an altricial species—have a prolonged period of dependency on support and input from caregivers who typically act as sources of co-regulation. Accordingly, attachment theory proposes that the history and quality of early interactions with primary caregivers shape children's internal working models of attachment. In turn, these attachment models guide behavior, initially with the set goal of maintaining proximity to caregivers but eventually paving the way to more generalized mental representations of self and others. Mounting evidence in non-clinical populations suggests that these mental representations coincide with differential patterns of neural structure, function, and connectivity in a range of brain regions previously associated with emotional and cognitive capacities. What is currently lacking, however, is an evidence-based account of how early adverse attachment-related experiences and/or the emergence of attachment disorganization impact the developing brain. While work on early childhood adversities offers important insights, we propose that how these events become biologically embedded crucially hinges on the context of the child–caregiver attachment relationships in which the events take place. Our selective review distinguishes between direct social neuroscience research on disorganized attachment and indirect maltreatment-related research, converging on aberrant functioning in neurobiological systems subserving aversion, approach, emotion regulation, and mental state processing in the wake of severe attachment disruption. To account for heterogeneity of findings, we propose two distinct neurobiological phenotypes characterized by hyper- and hypo-arousal primarily deriving from the caregiver serving either as a threatening or as an insufficient source of co-regulation, respectively.

Child maltreatment gives rise to atypical patterns of social functioning with peers which might be particularly pronounced in early adolescence when peer influence typically peaks. Yet, few neuroimaging studies in adolescents use peer interaction paradigms to parse neural correlates of distinct maltreatment exposures. This fMRI study examines effects of abuse, neglect, and emotional maltreatment (EM) among 98 youth (n = 58 maltreated; n = 40 matched controls) using an event-related Cyberball paradigm affording assessment of both social exclusion and inclusion across early and mid-adolescence (≤13.5 years, n = 50; >13.5 years, n = 48). Younger adolescents showed increased activation to social exclusion versus inclusion in regions implicated in mentalizing (e.g., superior temporal gyrus). Individual exposure-specific analyses suggested that neglect and EM coincided with less reduction of activation to social exclusion relative to inclusion in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex/pre-supplementary motor area (dACC/pre-SMA) among younger versus older adolescents. Integrative follow-up analyses showed that EM accounted for this dACC/pre-SMA activation pattern over and above other exposures. Moreover, age-independent results within respective exposure groups revealed that greater magnitude of neglect predicted blunted exclusion-related activity in the parahippocampal gyrus, while EM predicted increased activation to social exclusion in the precuneus/posterior cingulate cortex.

Different forms of maltreatment are thought to incur a cumulative and non-specific toll on mental health. However, few large-scale studies draw on psychiatric diagnoses manifesting in early childhood and adolescence to identify sequelae of differential maltreatment exposures, and emotional maltreatment, in particular. Fine-grained multi-source dimensional maltreatment assessments and validated age-appropriate clinical interviews were conducted in a sample of N = 778 3 to 16-year-olds. We aimed to (a) substantiate known patterns of clinical outcomes following maltreatment and (b) analyse relative effects of emotional maltreatment, abuse (physical and sexual), and neglect (physical, supervisory, and moral-legal/educational) using structural equation modeling. Besides confirming known relationships between maltreatment exposures and psychiatric disorders, emotional maltreatment exerted particularly strong effects on internalizing disorders in older youth and externalizing disorders in younger children, accounting for variance over and above abuse and neglect exposures. Our data highlight the toxicity of pathogenic relational experiences from early childhood onwards, urging researchers and practitioners alike to prioritize future work on emotional maltreatment.

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