Poster #66 - Threat-Relevant Attentional Biases Among Women with a History of Childhood Emotional Abuse

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Developmental Psychopathology

Integrative Statement

Background: Childhood maltreatment is associated with heightened risk for psychopathology, including anxiety and depression, later in adulthood. However, little is known about the specific mechanisms and moderators of risk. Cognitive models of psychopathology propose that biases in attention, interpretation, and memory for affectively-salient information may reflect one mechanism of risk (Beck, 1967; Bowlby, 1980), and that negative childhood experiences may contribute to the development of experience-specific biases (Cicchetti, Toth, & Maughan, 2000; Pollak, 2003). Prior studies have found relations between histories of childhood abuse and attentional biases toward threat-relevant stimuli (e.g. angry faces) (Pine et al., 2005; Gibb, Schofield & Coles, 2009); however, much of this research has focused on the effects of physical abuse (e.g. Johnson, Gibb & McGeary, 2009; Pollak & Tolley-Schell, 2003). To the extent that the development of attentional biases is based upon exposure to facial expressions of anger, then similar effects should be observed for a history of childhood emotional abuse, even in the absence of other forms of abuse. The current study aimed to test this hypothesis.

Method: Participants were 174 women (mean age = 35.9 years, SD = 6.3). Participants completed the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ; Bernstein & Fink, 1998) to assess levels of childhood emotional abuse (EA), physical abuse (PA), and sexual abuse (SA). Participants completed a passive viewing eye-tracking task, consisting of images of four faces arranged in a 2 x 2 grid representing angry, happy, sad, and neutral facial expressions. Trials were divided into 4s epochs (5 total). The proportion of gaze duration (i.e. sustained attention) was calculated for each emotion type.

Results: Using a repeated measures ANOVAs with EA, emotion, and epoch as independent variables and proportion gaze duration as the dependent variable, we found a significant EA x emotion interaction, F(3, 516) = 56.50, p = .03, ηp2 = .02. Examining the form of this interaction, we found significant EA group differences for gaze duration to angry faces, F(1, 172) = 5.34, p = .022, ηp2 = .03, but not sad, F(1,172) = 2.95, p = .088, happy, F(1, 172) = 3.07, p = .081, or neutral faces, F(1, 172) = .007, p = .94. Specifically, women with a history of EA exhibited greater sustained attention to angry faces than women with no history of EA. This effect was maintained after excluding women with comorbid PA and SA history, and after statistically controlling for current depression and anxiety symptoms.

Conclusion: These results suggest that women with a childhood history of emotional abuse exhibit attentional biases – greater sustained attention – specifically for facial displays of anger. These results were at least partially independent of women’s history of other forms of childhood abuse and current depression and anxiety symptoms. These results extend previous research and support conditioning models of the acquisition of attentional biases in which exposure to affectively salient angry faces, through exposure to emotional abuse, may contribute to the development of attentional biases even in the absence of other forms of abuse.

Authors

• Claire E Foster, Binghamton University
  Presenting Author

• Max Owens, University of South Florida
  Non-Presenting Author

• Anastacia Y Kudinova, Binghamton University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Brandon Gibb, Binghamton University
  Non-Presenting Author