ArticlePsychological medicine2018
Altered fear processing in adolescents with a history of severe childhood maltreatment: an fMRI study.
Article in Psychological medicine, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 38 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
38 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Annual Research Review: What processes are dysregulated among emotionally dysregulated youth? - a systematic review.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2025Pooled it
- Adverse Life Experiences and Brain Function: A Meta-Analysis of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Findings.JAMA network open · 2023Pooled it
- Effects of intranasal oxytocin on threat- and reward-related functional connectivity in men and women with and without childhood abuse-related PTSD.Psychiatry research. Neuroimaging · 2021Trial
- Emotional scars: limbic brain processing alterations in adults with childhood abuse across mental health disorders.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Early trauma and psychotic experiences in autism: a neurodevelopmental framework integrating allostatic overload, symbolisation, and stress reactivity.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Exploring the Relationship Between Childhood Maltreatment, Alexithymia, and Facial Emotional Recognition in Schizophrenia.Brain and behavior · 2025Article
- Atypical Neural Activation During Emotional but Not Nonemotional Response Inhibition in Healthy Young People Exposed to Childhood Maltreatment and Peer Victimization.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2025Article
- Childhood maltreatment is associated with lower exploration and disrupted prefrontal activity and connectivity during reward learning in volatile environments.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2025Article
- Alterations in cerebral resting state functional connectivity associated with social anxiety disorder and early life adversities.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Dampening of positive affect partially accounts for the association between women's history of child maltreatment and current depressive symptoms.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Sleep Quality and Cognitive Impairments in Children and Adolescents with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and/or Depressive Symptoms.Journal of clinical medicine · 2025Article
- Early life stress and altered social behaviors: A perspective across species.Neuroscience research · 2025Review
- Common neural correlates of disgust processing in childhood maltreatment and peer victimisation.BJPsych open · 2024Article
- TMS-fMRI Supports Roles for VLPFC and Downstream Regions in Cognitive Reappraisal.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Review
- Atypical brain structural connectivity and social cognition in childhood maltreatment and peer victimisation.BMC psychiatry · 2024Article
- Atypical Interpersonal Problem-Solving and Resting-state Functional Connectivity in Adolescents with Maltreatment Experience.Current neuropharmacology · 2024Article
- Heightened response to positive facial cues as a potential marker of resilience following childhood adversity.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2024Article
- The VLPFC-Engaged Voluntary Emotion Regulation: Combined TMS-fMRI Evidence for the Neural Circuit of Cognitive Reappraisal.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Characteristics of white matter structural connectivity in healthy adults with childhood maltreatment.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2023Article
- Childhood Maltreatment in Females Is Associated with Enhanced Fear Acquisition and an Overgeneralization of Fear.Brain sciences · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundChildren with a history of maltreatment suffer from altered emotion processing but the neural basis of this phenomenon is unknown. This pioneering functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated the effects of severe childhood maltreatment on emotion processing while controlling for psychiatric conditions, medication and substance abuse.
methodTwenty medication-naive, substance abuse-free adolescents with a history of childhood abuse, 20 psychiatric control adolescents matched on psychiatric diagnoses but with no maltreatment and 27 healthy controls underwent a fMRI emotion discrimination task comprising fearful, angry, sad happy and neutral dynamic facial expressions.
resultsMaltreated participants responded faster to fearful expressions and demonstrated hyper-activation compared to healthy controls of classical fear-processing regions of ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex, which survived at a more lenient threshold relative to psychiatric controls. Functional connectivity analysis, furthermore, demonstrated reduced connectivity between left vmPFC and insula for fear in maltreated participants compared to both healthy and psychiatric controls.
conclusionsThe findings show that people who have experienced childhood maltreatment have enhanced fear perception, both at the behavioural and neurofunctional levels, associated with enhanced fear-related ventromedial fronto-cingulate activation and altered functional connectivity with associated limbic regions. Furthermore, the connectivity adaptations were specific to the maltreatment rather than to the developing psychiatric conditions, whilst the functional changes were only evident at trend level when compared to psychiatric controls, suggesting a continuum. The neurofunctional hypersensitivity of fear-processing networks may be due to childhood over-exposure to fear in people who have been abused.
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