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Child / Adolescent - Trauma / Maltreatment

(PS4-C57) Beyond Just History: The Impact of Current Intrusive Thoughts of Maltreatment on Adult Mental Health

Friday, November 17, 2023
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PST
Location: Regency Ballroom, Level 7
Experiencing or being exposed to a traumatic event is relatively common in the human lifespan. Most people recover naturally from this experience, whereas others develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or other emotional symptoms. Contrary to ‘common sense’ assumptions and the DSM-5’s classification of traumatic events by severity, the extent of trauma a person experiences has not been demonstrated to predict the intensity or severity of their psychological response to the event (Boals et al., 2017). Thus, examining other predictors of emotional functioning following traumas such as child maltreatment remains important to intervention and prevention efforts. Consistent with the cognitive model of mental health, the current study investigated the extent to which intrusive thoughts of childhood maltreatment influenced adult mental health above and beyond what is accounted for by severity/frequency of maltreatment alone in an undergraduate sample (N = 222; 61.7% female; 78.8% White; mean age 19.2 years). Participants completed the Maltreatment History and Impact Questionnaire (MHIQ) developed for this study. The MHIQ has four pairs of items each related to five types of child maltreatment (physical abuse, physical neglect, emotional abuse, emotional neglect, and sexual abuse). For each item, participants indicated the frequency they had experienced that type of maltreatment as a child on a scale from 0 (never) to 3 (often) as well as how often they are “bothered by thoughts of this as an adult?.” These are titled the Frequency and Bother subscales, respectively. The participants also completed the 335-item MMPI-3 (Ben-Porath & Tellegen, 2020). The demoralization subscale of the MMPI was used for this study. Demoralization represents a non-specific, general distress attribute of most mental health difficulties. It was hypothesized that intrusive thoughts related to childhood maltreatment would predict adult demoralization above and beyond what was predicted by frequency of childhood maltreatment experiences. This hypothesis was tested using a hierarchical regression with the five types of child maltreatment experiences entered in step one and the total Bother score entered in step 2. The hypothesis was supported, with the addition of current bothersome thoughts of maltreatment in step 2 accounting for an additional 7% of the variance in Demoralization scores above the 27% accounted for by step 1, ΔF (1, 214)=22.07, p< .001. Furthermore, in the final step 2 model, bothersome thoughts about child maltreatment were the strongest predictor of current demoralization (β=.42) with the next strongest predictor being frequency of emotional neglect experiences (β=.38). These results indicate that adults’ frequency of intrusive thoughts about childhood maltreatment predicted demoralization and mental health symptoms even more strongly than the frequency of maltreatment itself. This is further evidence that internal, cognitive factors may be more salient in the development of emotional distress than the severity or extent of the traumatic event itself, which is promising to the field of clinical psychology and supports the use of cognitive-behavioral treatments aiming to reduce intrusive thoughts.
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