Citation

English LH, Wisener M, Bailey HN. Child Abuse Negl. 2018; 80: 146-160.

Affiliation

University of Guelph, 50 Stone Rd E, Guelph, ON N1G 2W1, Canada. Electronic address: hnbailey@uoguelph.ca.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.chiabu.2018.02.006

PMID

29605464

Abstract

The current study investigated factors thought to contribute to facial emotion processing. Female university students (N = 126) completed self-report measures of childhood emotional maltreatment, anxiety symptoms, attachment anxiety and avoidance, and trait mindfulness before completing a facial emotion recognition task, where they viewed sequences of faces that incorporated progressively more emotional content until they were able to correctly identify the emotion. They completed the task under low and high cognitive load conditions to distinguish between relatively effortful versus automatic processing abilities. Regression analyses revealed that under low cognitive load, attachment avoidance and mindfulness predicted quicker identification of fear (i.e., with less perceptual information), whereas anxiety predicted slower identification of fear (i.e., with more perceptual information). In the high cognitive load condition, emotional maltreatment and mindfulness predicted quicker identification of fear, and anxiety and mindfulness predicted faster identification of emotions overall. Although current findings are correlational, most of these effects were specific to fearful faces, suggesting that experiences of childhood emotional maltreatment and associated socio-emotional sequelae are related to heightened processing of threat-related information.

Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Language: en

Keywords

Anxiety; Attachment; Cognitive load; Emotional maltreatment; Facial emotion processing; Mindfulness