From maltreatment to mistrust: Impaired belief updating as a mechanism linking childhood maltreatment to interpersonal and clinical outcomes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Childhood maltreatment (CM), defined as caregiver-perpetrated abuse or neglect during childhood or adolescence, is associated with enduring social dysfunction. Adults with a history of CM often maintain greater interpersonal distance from both friends and strangers, regardless of relational closeness. Predictive-processing models suggest that such impairments may stem from the development of overly precise negative beliefs about others, which are resistant to updating, even in the face of contradictory information. The current study investigated whether the ability to form and update social beliefs varies as a function of CM history, and whether belief updating moderates the association between CM and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms following trauma exposure in adulthood. One hundred and eighteen participants completed a battery of questionnaires and a performance-based task assessing belief formation and updating about friends and strangers. Results indicated no CM-related differences in initial belief formation. However, as predicted, adults with a CM history showed impaired belief updating when interacting with strangers. Importantly, deficits in stranger-related belief updating moderated the relationship between CM severity and PTSD symptoms: those with poor updating showed a stronger association between CM and PTSD, while those with greater flexibility in belief updating reported low symptom levels regardless of maltreatment severity. These findings suggest that CM may disrupt adaptive belief updating in interpersonal contexts, contributing to later vulnerability to psychopathology. The results highlight the potential value of targeting social cognitive processes, particularly belief updating, in interventions aimed at improving social functioning and psychological resilience among individuals with a history of CM.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".