Childhood Emotional Maltreatment Severity Is Associated with Dorsal Medial Prefrontal Cortex Responsivity to Social Exclusion in Young Adults

Abstract

Children who have experienced chronic parental rejection and exclusion during childhood, as is the case in childhood emotional maltreatment, may become especially sensitive to social exclusion. This study investigated the neural and emotional responses to social exclusion (with the Cyberball task) in young adults reporting childhood emotional maltreatment. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated brain responses and self-reported distress to social exclusion in 46 young adult patients and healthy controls (mean age = 19.2±2.16) reporting low to extreme childhood emotional maltreatment. Consistent with prior studies, social exclusion was associated with activity in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex. In addition, severity of childhood emotional maltreatment was positively associated with increased dorsal medial prefrontal cortex responsivity to social exclusion. The dorsal medial prefrontal cortex plays a crucial role in self-and other-referential processing, suggesting that the more individuals have been rejected and maltreated in childhood, the more self- and other- processing is elicited by social exclusion in adulthood. Negative self-referential thinking, in itself, enhances cognitive vulnerability for the development of psychiatric disorders. Therefore, our findings may underlie the emotional and behavioural difficulties that have been reported in adults reporting childhood emotional maltreatment.

Neural correlates of social exclusion across ages: A coordinate-based meta-analysis of functional MRI studies

“…Refer to Table 1 for an overview of these studies. Two Cyberball studies that provided main effects combining across both healthy control and clinical samples were included in this list (Domsalla et al, 2014; van Harmelen et al, 2014). However, we report findings from analyses that exclude these samples as well.…”

The complex neurobiology of resilient functioning after child maltreatment

“…J. McCrory et al, 2013;Olsavsky et al, 2013;Suzuki et al, 2014;N Tottenham et al, 2011;Van Harmelen et al, 2013) and altered striatal reward processing (Boecker et al, 2014;Dillon et al, 2009;Hanson, Hariri, & Williamson, 2015;Holz et al, 2016;Philip et al, 2016). Furthermore, CM has been associated with altered activity in, as well as functional connectivity between, PFC regions associated with stress response and emotion regulation (Bruce et al, 2013;Gregory A. Fonzo, Huemer, & Etkin, 2016;Jankowski et al, 2016;Lim et al, 2015;Mueller et al, 2010;Vanessa B Puetz et al, 2014;S J A van der Werff et al, 2012;van Harmelen, Hauber, et al, 2014;van Harmelen, van Tol, et al, 2014).…”

Social Work Education and Avoidable Ignorance

“…Personal and social problems are closely linked (Mills, 1959). Social workers see clients whose lives are affected by social and economic inequities including lack of health care, poor-quality education, and lack of or substandard housing (Adler & Stewart, 2010;Haushofer, 2013;Van Harmelen et al, 2014). Classism and racism are rife.…”