Childhood Trauma and Personal Mastery: Their Influence on Emotional Reactivity to Everyday Events in a Community Sample of Middle-Aged Adults

Abstract

Childhood trauma is associated with premature declines in health in midlife and old age. Pathways that have been implicated, but less studied include social-emotional regulation, biological programming, and habitual patterns of thought and action. In this study we focused on childhood trauma’s influence via alterations in social-emotional regulation to everyday life events, a pathway that has been linked to subsequent health effects. Data from a 30-day daily diary of community residents who participated in a study of resilience in Midlife (n = 191, Mage = 54, SD = 7.50, 54% women) was used to examine whether self-reports of childhood trauma were associated with daily well-being, as well as reported and emotional reactivity to daily negative and positive events. Childhood trauma reports were associated with reporting lower overall levels of and greater variability in daily well-being. Childhood trauma was linked to greater reports of daily negative events, but not to positive events. Focusing on emotional reactivity to daily events, residents who reported higher levels of childhood trauma showed stronger decreases in well-being when experiencing negative events and also stronger increases in well-being with positive events. For those reporting childhood trauma, higher levels of mastery were associated with stronger decreases in well-being with negative events and stronger increases in well-being with positive events, suggesting that mastery increases sensitivity to daily negative and positive events. Our results suggest that childhood trauma may lead to poorer health in midlife through disturbances in the patterns of everyday life events and responses to those events. Further, our findings indicate that mastery may have a different meaning for those who experienced childhood trauma. We discuss social-emotional regulation as one pathway linking childhood trauma to health, and psychosocial resources to consider when building resilience-promoting interventions for mitigating the detrimental health effects of childhood trauma.

A daily process examination of the relationship between childhood trauma and stress-reactivity

“…Our results broadly replicated findings from Glaser et al (2006), Infurna et al (2015) and Lardinois et al (2011), showing higher global NA in response to daily stress for those reporting more CT, specifically sexual abuse. Although these studies did not examine differences in trauma type, our results suggest that early sexual abuse rather than early physical abuse may have driven this observed effect.…”

“…For example, Glaser, van Os, Portegijs and Myin-Germeys's (2006) study of adults with histories of somatic complaints, Lardinois, Lataster, Mengelers, van Os and Myin-Germeys's (2011) study of adult patients with recent onset non-affective psychotic disorder and Infurna, Rivers, Reich, and Zautra's (2015) study of middle-aged adult community residents all found that individuals with a history of CT, compared to individuals without CT histories, showed stronger daily stress-reactivity. Although the results of these studies support the notion that CT increases vulnerability to later-life ED, several aspects of measurement require further investigation.…”

“…Second, unlike previous studies of CT and stress-reactivity that have focused on global NA (e.g., Infurna et al, 2015;Glaser et al, 2006;Rivers, Brackett, Katulak, & Salovey, 2007), our study examined anxiety, depression and anger separately in addition to overall NA. Research indicates that discrete emotions provide different functional information and are often associated with unique antecedents and physiological effects (e.g., Berenbaum, Fujita, & Pfenning, 1995;Izard & Ackerman, 2000;Rivers et al, 2007).…”

Affective disturbance in rheumatoid arthritis: psychological and disease-related pathways

“…101 Hypervigilance and other fear-related motivational states have been associated with high levels on the anxiety dimension [G] of insecure attachment. Differential responsiveness to social reward and high reactivity to social stressors have been identified among individuals with a history of abuse, 103 and a reduction in ventral striatum activation following social rewards has been found in those with insecure attachment characterized by avoidance. 104 A history of child abuse and attachment insecurity, as well as contemporaneous social factors, could set the stage for future disability and impair both physiological and psychological processes associated with resilient adaptation to chronic pain.…”

Biological embedding: evaluation and analysis of an emerging concept for nursing scholarship

“…Some authors used biological programming in a manner synonymous with biological embedding, demonstrating a clear overlap of these concepts (Rutter & O’Connor 2004, McArthur et al . 2005, Rutter 2006, Schuler & Auger 2010, Infurna et al . 2015, Pariante 2015).…”