Childhood Maltreatment and Coping in Bipolar Disorder

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 = 19.262.16) 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.

Annual Research Review: Enduring neurobiological effects of childhood abuse and neglect

“…parental verbal abuse (Choi, Jeong, Rohan, Polcari, & Teicher, 2009;Tomoda et al, 2011), peer emotional abuse (Teicher, Samson, Sheu, Polcari, & McGreenery, 2010), harsh corporal punishment (Sheu, Polcari, Anderson, & Teicher, 2010;Tomoda, Suzuki, et al, 2009)]. Interestingly, some of the most recent studies have focused predominantly on subjects with emotional maltreatment (Hanson, Hariri, & Williamson, 2015;van der Werff et al, 2013b;van Harmelen, Hauber, et al, 2014;van Harmelen, van Tol, et al, 2014).…”

Imaging suicidal thoughts and behaviors: a comprehensive review of 2 decades of neuroimaging studies

“…Future studies should also further investigate the more elusive subjective aspects of suicide risk, such as SI, as well as implicated psychological constructs such as hopelessness, rumination, and anhedonia [209][210][211], which may be relevant across diagnoses. Similarly, social experiences such as childhood maltreatment and peer bullying form a strong prelude to STB in later life [208,212,213], and impact on the neural structures implicated in STB (e.g., DMPFC structure and function [214,215]). Therefore, adverse experiences should be taken into account in future studies on the neurobiology of STB.…”

Altered neural response to rejection‐related words in children exposed to maltreatment

“…Several studies have demonstrated that maltreated children show an enhanced response to threatening facial expressions at the behavioural (Pollak et al., ) and neural levels, with altered functioning reported in the amygdala, anterior insula and prefrontal cortices (e.g. van Harmelen et al., ; McCrory et al., ). These structures have also been implicated in the psychopathology of affective disorders (Etkin & Wager, ) commonly elevated in individuals with maltreatment histories.…”

“…Two recent fMRI studies have aimed to assess the processing of more socially complex constructs in maltreated children. Using a Cyberball paradigm, which simulates the experience of social rejection, these studies have demonstrated that maltreatment experience is associated with heightened distress and altered neural activity to social rejection (van Harmelen et al., ; Puetz et al., ). The experience of social rejection is an established risk factor for psychopathology and poor academic performance in the population at large (Masten et al., ; Platt, Cohen Kadosh, & Lau, ; Sebastian, Viding, Williams, & Blakemore, ; Silk et al., ).…”