ArticleCognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience2018
Childhood maltreatment is associated with increased neural response to ambiguous threatening facial expressions in adulthood: Evidence from the late positive potential.
Article in Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- No association of childhood maltreatment experiences and attention to facial emotions in men.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Stage-specific changes in schematic facial emotion recognition following childhood trauma: an ERP study.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Parental Expressed Emotion Criticism Relates to Everyday Perceptions of Social Threat in Adolescents with Varying Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2026Article
- Persistent priming of hypothalamic microglia is associated with sensitization of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis to acute stress, hyperactivity and behavioral response disruption in male rats.Frontiers in immunology · 2026Article
- The Effect of Childhood Maltreatment on Affect Labeling in Youth: An ERP Study.Brain and behavior · 2025Article
- Adverse childhood experiences and internalizing symptoms: the moderating role of neural responses to threat.Neurobiology of stress · 2025Article
- Neurophysiological Differences in Auditory Threat Processing in Young Children Exposed to Intimate Partner Violence: a Pilot Study.Developmental psychobiology · 2025Article
- Article
- Enhanced cognitive control following neurofeedback therapy in chronic treatment-resistant PTSD among refugees: a feasibility study.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Neighborhood Crime Risk and Racial/Ethnic Differences in Children's Neural Reactivity to Emotional Stimuli.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Article
- Facing ambiguity: Social threat sensitivity mediates the association between peer victimization and adolescent anxiety.Development and psychopathology · 2024Article
- Age- and sex-specific effects of maternal separation on the acoustic startle reflex in rats: early baseline enhancement in females and blunted response to ambiguous threat.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Social threat and safety learning in individuals with adverse childhood experiences: electrocortical evidence on face processing, recognition, and working memory.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2022Article
- The Childhood Maltreatment Modulates the Impact of Negative Emotional Stimuli on Conflict Resolution.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Childhood maltreatment increases lifetime vulnerability for psychopathology. One proposed mechanism for this association is that early maltreatment increases vigilance for and attention to subtle threat cues, persisting outside of the environment in which maltreatment occurs. To test this possibility, the present study examined neural responses to ambiguous and nonambiguous threatening facial expressions in a sample of 25 adults reporting a history of low-to-moderate levels of abuse in childhood and 46 reporting no or low levels of childhood maltreatment. The measure of neural response used was the late positive potential (LPP), a neural marker of sustained attention to motivationally salient information that is sensitive to subtle variation in emotional content. Participants passively viewed angry-neutral and fearful-neutral face blends and rated emotional intensity for each face. In the maltreated group, as fearful faces increased in emotional intensity, the LPP similarly increased, suggesting increased sensitivity to subtle variation in threatening content. Moreover, the LPP at each level of emotional intensity was not related to current symptoms of anxiety and depression. However, contrary to our hypotheses, adults with a history of abuse did not rate angry or fearful faces as more threatening, nor did they exhibit a larger LPP to angry faces, compared to controls. These findings suggest that childhood maltreatment may be associated with increased sensitivity to ambiguous threatening information in adulthood.
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