This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.

Strategies to regulate emotion effective among maltreated children

When given strategies to regulate emotions, adolescents who experienced maltreatment were able to modulate their emotional responses when viewing positive, negative and neutral stimuli.

“The strong associations between child maltreatment and psychopathology have generated interest in identifying neurodevelopmental processes that are disrupted following maltreatment. Previous research has focused largely on neural response to negative facial emotion,” Katie A. McLaughlin, PhD, of the University of Washington in Seattle, and colleagues wrote. “We determined whether child maltreatment was associated with neural responses during passive viewing of negative and positive emotional stimuli and effortful attempts to regulate emotional responses.”

Katie A. McLaughlin

Researchers measured blood oxygen level–dependent responses of 42 adolescents, aged 13 to 19 years, as they viewed negative and positive emotional stimuli and attempted to modulate emotional responses using cognitive reappraisal. Half of the study cohort had been exposed to physical and/or sexual abuse.

When viewing negative stimuli, adolescents exposed to maltreatment exhibited increased response in multiple nodes of the salience network, including amygdala, putamen and anterior insula.

During attempts to decrease responses to negative stimuli, maltreated adolescents exhibited greater response in the superior frontal gyrus, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and frontal pole. Similarly, adolescents unexposed to maltreatment down-regulated amygdala response.

Researchers found no associations between maltreatment and neural response to positive emotional stimuli during passive viewing or effortful regulation.

“Child maltreatment appears to heighten the salience of negative emotional stimuli. Although maltreated adolescents are able to modulate amygdala activation to a degree similar to that of non-maltreated youths when taught specific emotion regulation strategies, they use [prefrontal cortex] regions involved in effortful control of emotion to a greater degree to do so. Greater engagement of these regions might reflect that maltreated youths must devote greater cognitive resources to modulating emotional responses than non-maltreated children,” the researchers wrote. “Nevertheless, our findings suggest that training in cognitive reappraisal strategies is likely to be an effective tool for reducing emotional reactivity to negative emotional stimuli among maltreated youths.” – by Amanda Oldt

Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.