Childhood Maltreatment and Depressotypic Cognitive Organization

Abstract

Recent research suggests that how information is organized in the mind may be important for determining one's vulnerability to depression. The purpose of the current study was to examine potential developmental precursors to a depressotypic cognitive organization (i.e., tightly-connected negative schemas and loosely-connected positive schemas) in a sample of young adult men and women (N = 91). The relation between childhood maltreatment (i.e., mother emotional maltreatment, father emotional maltreatment, physical abuse, and sexual abuse) and cognitive organization was assessed using a computer task in which participants with different self-reported maltreatment histories plotted a series of cognitive schema contents (e.g., ''I am a failure'') on a 2-dimensional grid along the dimensions of self-descriptiveness and valence. As hypothesized, higher levels of mother emotional maltreatment, father emotional maltreatment and physical abuse (but not sexual abuse) were associated with a depressotypic schema organization. Consistent with hypotheses, a depressotypic schema organization mediated the relation between maltreatment and depression, suggesting that the organization of cognitive schemas may help to elucidate why individuals with maltreatment histories are so vulnerable to develop depression.

The Mediating Role of Early Maladaptive Schemas in the Relationships of Emotional Maltreatment and Emotional Disorders

“…The results of this study indicate that emotional maltreatment influences emotional disorders directly and through some schemas as mediators which support past research by many authors (SHAFFER et al 2009;SHENK et al 2010;GIBB & ABELA 2008;LUMLEY & HARKNESS 2009;ABDOLAHZADEH RAFI 2014;LESSON & NIXON 2011) 1 . The mediation analysis suggested that early maladaptive schemas such as Anxiety.…”

Cognitive Organization, Perceptions of Parenting and Depression Symptoms in Early Adolescence

“…Tightly-interconnected negative schema organization predicts both anxiety and depression and loosely-interconnected positive schema organization demonstrates specificity to depression (Dozois 2007;Dozois andDobson 2001a, b, 2003;Dozois and Frewen 2006;Lumley and Harkness 2009;Segal et al 1995Segal et al , 1988. Longitudinal investigations of schema organization in depression demonstrate that cognitive organization is stable between depressive episodes, supporting the theory that these structures are enduring (Dozois and Dobson 2001a;Dozois 2007;Seeds and Dozois 2010).…”

“…Much less examined are potential developmental origins of depressotypic cognitive organization. In one exception, Lumley and Harkness (2009) demonstrated that cognitive organization was linked to experiences of childhood emotional and physical abuse in young adults. Parenting research suggests that even comparatively more subtle and widely experienced forms of negative parenting are implicated in models of risk.…”

“…Cross-sectional investigations (Bruce et al 2006;Garber et al 1993;Gladstone and Kaslow 1995;Kercher et al 2009;Lumley and Harkness 2007;Rudolph et al 1997) and prospective investigations (Hankin et al 2004;Lewinsohn et al 2001) have consistently supported the idea that cognitive schema content may be a diathesis for childhood emotional disorders. Much less examined in this developmental work is how schema content is organized or structured in the mind (e.g., how interconnected a negative schema is with other negative schema content) despite cognitive organization's strong relation to adult and late adolescent depression and its theorized development across childhood and adolescence (Dozois and Beck 2008;Lumley and Harkness 2009). Researchers have also stressed the importance of examining developmental origins of cognitive vulnerabilities to depression (e.g., Alloy et al 2006).…”

Maternal versus paternal physical and emotional abuse, affect regulation and risk for depression from adolescence to early adulthood

“…As a result, more attention has been directed toward understanding the common mechanisms and processes that may mediate risk transmission across development. For example, cognitive vulnerabilities such as cognitive schemas (e.g., Lumley & Harkness, 2009;Wright, Crawford, & Del Castillo, 2009), automatic negative self-associations (e.g., van Harmelen et al, 2010), and rumination (e.g., Raes & Hermans, 2008) have been proposed to arise from abuse experiences and potentially mediate the relationship between abuse and depression over time.…”