A review of the long‐term impact of child maltreatment on posttraumatic stress disorder and its comorbidities: An emotion dysregulation perspective.

Abstract

This review examines posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) related to child maltreatment in adults, PTSD comorbidities, and complex PTSD, with a focus on emotion dysregulation. Adults maltreated as children report high rates of PTSD. Although all forms of child maltreatment are associated with increased PTSD risk, effects are stronger for child sexual and emotional abuse, abuse in the context of other adverse childhood experiences, and cumulative abuse. PTSD comorbidities that involve emotion dysregulation are examined, including substance use disorders, eating disorders, and borderline personality disorder. Emotion dysregulation appears to be a coalescent factor in the nexus of child maltreatment, PTSD, and other comorbidities. Treatment recommendations are made for adults with child maltreatment–related PTSD and comorbidities.

Testing competing factor models of the latent structure of post-traumatic stress disorder and complex post-traumatic stress disorder according to ICD-11

“…It has been well established that problems with emotional dysregulation are a common consequence of trauma across a variety of traumatized populations (Dvir, Ford, Hill, & Frazier, 2014; Messman-Moore & Bhuptani, 2017). However, evidence suggests that different aspects of affect dysregulation may be more salient in certain types of trauma.…”

Mechanisms linking childhood trauma exposure and psychopathology: a transdiagnostic model of risk and resilience

“…Recent evidence suggests that low emotional awareness is also associated with the general psychopathology (i.e., p-factor) and mediates the association between childhood trauma and the p-factor [76]. Similarly, disruptions in emotion regulation are associated with virtually all types of psychopathology and predict the onset of internalizing and externalizing problems [87][88][89][90] as well as account for comorbidity between disorders [5,91,92]. Indeed, elevated emotional reactivity, difficulties with emotion regulation, and reduced functional coupling between the mPFC and amygdala-a neural pattern associated with poor implicit emotion regulation-have all been shown to mediate the link between childhood trauma exposure and transdiagnostic psychopathology [61,67,68,84,86], including the p-factor [63].…”

Dissociation fully mediates the relationship between childhood sexual and emotional abuse and DSM-5 PTSD in a sample of treatment-seeking adults

“…Furthermore, the current data provided no opportunity to control for later victimization that might co-explain the high prevalence of PTSD in the sample (95.3 %). As child maltreatment is related to further risk of additional victimization thorough life (Messman-Moore & Bhuptani, 2017), further research should account for this in the mediation model. Lastly, the variables included in this study was limited to the measures included in the intake form at the National Health Service trauma centre in Scotland.…”