Background
Cognitive models of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) propose that trauma entails cognitive alterations of increased distrust and perceived threat from others. We tested whether these predictions also hold in individuals with varying levels of childhood maltreatment (CM), which is much more prevalent than traumatic events as required for a PTSD diagnosis. We hypothesized that higher levels of CM would entail greater distrust and perceived threat, and that distrust would be more change-resistant in participants with more CM.
Methods
The study was pre-registered; the pre-registration protocol, data, and code are available at https://osf.io/pufy2/. We recruited 549 participants (M age = 29.2, 74.5% women) for an online study via websites related to CM, Borderline Personality Disorder, and via snowball method on social media. Participants self-reported their level of CM on the childhood trauma questionnaire (CTQ). Next, they played two rounds of a hypothetical distrust game, indicating the perceived trustworthiness of avatars by way of estimating expected monetary deductions from them (i.e. higher amounts indicating greater distrust). After the first round, we provided participants with the feedback that very little money was taken from them. We expected those with more CM to be less responsive to the positive feedback and to adapt their estimates less in the subsequent round. Following the distrust game, participants completed an emotion rating task in which they rated the emotional expressions of 60 faces on a scale from ‘very negative’ to ‘very positive’. We included angry, fearful, and happy facial expressions, and expected individuals with higher CM levels to provide more negative ratings. We conducted linear mixed effects models with random intercepts for raters and stimuli (crossed), and modelled random slopes for all within-person predictors.
Results
As hypothesized, higher levels of CM were associated with higher levels of distrust and a weaker decrease in distrust following positive feedback. Further supporting our hypotheses, individuals with higher levels of CM showed more negatively shifted emotion ratings.
Conclusions
Increased distrust and perceived interpersonal threat following trauma, as proposed in cognitive models of PTSD, likely also apply to individuals with CM, following a dose-response relationship. We discuss clinical implications of considering any level of CM as a potentially relevant treatment-factor, even when a trauma-related disorder is not the main diagnosis, and propose future research avenues.
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The negative impact of climate change on mental health has gained increased attention in recent years, with studies documenting elevated rates of mental disorders in areas affected by natural disasters. At the same time, anxiety or distress over climate change have been described as natural responses to an existential threat that is not per se pathological. Climate change distress (CCD) may even be a motivating force for pro-environmental behavior (PEB) and ultimately help mitigate the effects of climate change. In the present study, we tested a number or pre-registered hypotheses (https://osf.io/jqb58) on the association between CCD and PEB in an online sample of 550 German-speaking participants. We assessed PEB at a behavioral level using a modified work-for-environmental-protection-task and a modified dictator game, and measured CCD and climate change-associated impairment (CCI) via self-report. Additionally, we investigated participant age and gender as moderators of the CCD-PEB association (data and code available at https://osf.io/eprdw/). In a series of regression analyses, we observed that CCD was linearly associated with a higher level of PEB in both paradigms, such that individuals who were more distressed were more likely to complete a working memory task to generate donations or sacrifice their own payoff in the dictator game to donate to environmental protection organizations. As predicted, younger individuals and women (vs. men) experienced higher levels of both CCD and CCI. Contrary to hypotheses, age and gender did not moderate the CCD-PEB association. We discuss the high prevalence of CCD in the sample and lay out directions for future work to assess avenues for increasing PEB whilst protecting climate-related mental health.
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