Child Maltreatment and Neural Systems Underlying Emotion Regulation

Abstract

OBJECTIVE The strong associations between child maltreatment and psychopathology have generated interest in identifying neurodevelopmental processes that are disrupted following maltreatment. Previous research has largely focused on neural response to negative facial emotion. We determined whether child maltreatment was associated with neural responses during passive viewing of negative and positive emotional stimuli and effortful attempts to regulate emotional responses. METHOD 42 adolescents aged 13–19 years, half with exposure to physical and/or sexual abuse, participated. Blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) response was measured during passive viewing of negative and positive emotional stimuli and attempts to modulate emotional responses using cognitive reappraisal. RESULTS Maltreated adolescents exhibited heightened response in multiple nodes of the salience network, including amygdala, putamen, and anterior insula, to negative relative to neutral stimuli. During attempts to decrease responses to negative stimuli relative to passive viewing, maltreatment was associated with greater recruitment of superior frontal gyrus, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and frontal pole; adolescents with and without maltreatment down-regulated amygdala response to a similar degree. No associations were observed between maltreatment and neural response to positive emotional stimuli during passive viewing or effortful regulation. CONCLUSION Child maltreatment heightens the salience of negative emotional stimuli. Although maltreated adolescents modulate amygdala responses to negative cues to a similar degree as non-maltreated youths, they utilize regions involved in effortful control to a greater degree to do so, potentially because greater effort is required to modulate heightened amygdala responses. These findings are promising, given the centrality of cognitive restructuring in trauma-focused treatments for children.

Dimensions of childhood adversity have distinct associations with neural systems underlying executive functioning

“…The results from other aspects of this study have been published elsewhere (McLaughlin et al, 2015; Peverill et al, 2016). Parents were not willing to provide information about their educational attainment for five participants.…”

The association between early life stress and prefrontal cortex activation during implicit emotion regulation is moderated by sex in early adolescence

“…For example, McLaughlin et al (2015) used a cognitive reappraisal task to examine fMRI responses of 13- to 19-year-old participants as they attempted to explicitly regulate their affective responses to emotionally salient images. Although previously maltreated adolescents showed the typical increased response in regions involved in processing salient stimuli to viewing negative images, they also showed increased activation in superior frontal gyrus and frontal pole when downregulating their negative affect to a negative image, relative to nonmaltreated adolescents.…”

The maternal brain in women with a history of early-life maltreatment: an imagination-based fMRI study of conflictual versus pleasant interactions with children

“…Several studies have linked ELM to functional alterations in brain regions involved in salience and emotion processing, such as increased amygdala activation to (adult) sad faces, 27 increased salience of emotionally negative stimuli 28 and decreased connectivity within the salience network, 29 but very little is known about the neuronal correlates of maternal responsiveness in people with ELM. The only previous studies investigating neural responses to infant cues in traumatized mothers (with posttraumatic stress disorder) showed higher amygdala and insula activations and reduced prefrontal activations to videos of their distressed children compared with healthy controls.…”