Childhood Emotional Abuse and Somatic Symptoms: The Mediating Effect of Self‐Hate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Childhood emotional abuse is a recognized factor for long‐term psychological and physical health problems, including persistent somatic symptoms. Negative self‐beliefs, such as self‐hate‐related beliefs, may explain how emotional mistreatment contributes to physical distress in adulthood beyond general emotional difficulties. A longitudinal study was conducted with 298 help‐seeking adults. At baseline, participants completed measures of childhood emotional abuse, self‐hate, and general negative affectivity. Somatic symptoms were assessed two months later. Mediation analyses tested whether self‐hate mediated the relationship between childhood emotional abuse and somatic symptoms while accounting for the influence of general negative affectivity, which reflects a general tendency to experience negative emotional states. Participants ( M age = 33.7, SD = 11.8) were predominantly female (63.3%) and Caucasian (84.2%). Childhood emotional abuse ( M = 11.24, SD = 6.60) was significantly associated with self‐hate ( M = 10.35, SD = 6.13, r = 0.33, p < 0.001) and somatic symptoms ( M = 13.99, SD = 6.76, r = 0.27, p < 0.001). Self‐hate strongly correlated with somatic symptoms ( r = 0.45, p < 0.001). Mediation analyses showed that self‐hate significantly mediated the link between emotional abuse and somatic symptoms, even after accounting for general negative affectivity as a covariate (indirect effect = 0.07, 99% CI [0.03, 0.13]). These findings highlight self‐hate as a key mechanism linking childhood emotional abuse to somatic symptoms. Even when controlling for broader emotional instability, self‐hate remained central. Addressing these negative self‐beliefs through targeted interventions may help reduce both emotional suffering and associated physical manifestations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".