The relationship between child maltreatment subtypes and components of emotional competence in emerging adults

Child maltreatment is a pervasive public health issue that affects one in four children each year on a global scale. While not everyone who experiences child maltreatment has poor mental or physical health outcomes, many do suffer from emotional difficulties such as difficulty with emotion regulation and emotion recognition. Though child maltreatment is often studied as a single cumulative category, it comprises of different subtypes including physical and sexual abuse, emotional maltreatment, physical neglect, and exposure to domestic violence. Each of these subtypes have been linked with emotion regulation and emotion recognition problems, however, maltreatment subtypes frequently co-occur. Due to this overlap, when different maltreatment subtypes are not taken into consideration, effects may be overestimated or misattributed. There is currently a dearth of literature that examines the differential effects of childhood maltreatment subtypes on emotion regulation dimensions and the recognition of specific emotions. Additionally, while both emotion regulation and emotion recognition are core components of emotional competence, they are conceptualized to be distinct domains. Despite this, child maltreatment has been robustly associated with both emotion regulation and emotion recognition deficits suggesting that they may be related processes. Currently, without a theoretical basis on the relationship between different components of emotional competence, the relationship between emotion regulation and emotion recognition is unclear. As such, this dissertation aims to take a fine-grained approach to better understand the differential effects of child maltreatment subtypes on emotion regulation dimensions and the recognition of specific emotions in Study 1. Study 2 aims to empirically assess the relationship between emotion regulation and emotion recognition by examining the moderating role of emotion regulation in the relationship between child maltreatment and emotion recognition. Considering how emerging adulthood (18 – 25 years) is a developmental period where psychopathology often emerges, there is an impetus to better understand how child maltreatment impacts emotional functioning in this understudied population within child maltreatment research. A sample of 573 emerging adults were recruited across Canada to complete an online survey that asked about child maltreatment history, difficulty with emotion regulation, and involved an emotion recognition task. Path analyses in Study 1 indicated that emotional maltreatment had a global effect on emotion regulation difficulties and the recognition of negatively valanced emotions (anger, fear, and sadness). Neglect predicted difficulties with managing impulsive behaviour; sexual abuse predicted difficulties engaging in goal-directed behaviour. Physical abuse was associated with poorer recognition of fear. Multigroup analysis revealed that patterns did not differ between clinically distressed and non-distressed participants. In Study 2, moderation analysis revealed that child maltreatment was associated with poorer recognition of negatively valanced emotions, but only in the context of poor emotion regulation, however, exploratory analyses examining differential patterns revealed more nuanced relationships. While most maltreatment subtypes significantly interacted with emotion regulation (impulse control difficulties and limited access to emotion regulation strategies), the moderation was only significant for the recognition of disgust. Together, the results from both studies provide insight into the significant impact of emotional maltreatment on both emotion regulation and emotion recognition and how these patterns change when emotion regulation is examined as a moderator. These findings highlight the presence of common and disparate elements between child maltreatment subtypes which provide a basis for more targeted approaches to intervention for survivors of child maltreatment

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