Elsevier

Child Abuse & Neglect

Volume 38, Issue 10, October 2014, Pages 1590-1598
Child Abuse & Neglect

Emotion dysregulation as a mediator between childhood emotional abuse and current depression in a low-income African-American sample☆

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2014.05.015Get rights and content

Abstract

Abuse and neglect in childhood are well-established risk factors for later psychopathology. Past research has suggested that childhood emotional abuse may be particularly harmful to psychological development. The current cross-sectional study employed multiple regression techniques to assess the effects of childhood trauma on adulthood depression and emotion dysregulation in a large sample of mostly low-income African Americans recruited in an urban hospital. Bootstrap analyses were used to test emotion dysregulation as a potential mediator between emotional abuse in childhood and current depression. Childhood emotional abuse significantly predicted depressive symptoms even when accounting for all other childhood trauma types, and we found support for a complementary mediation of this relationship by emotion dysregulation. Our findings highlight the importance of emotion dysregulation and childhood emotional abuse in relation to adult depression. Moving forward, clinicians should consider the particular importance of emotional abuse in the development of depression, and future research should seek to identify mechanisms through which emotional abuse increases risk for depression and emotion dysregulation.

Section snippets

Procedure

Participants in this study were recruited as part of the Grady Trauma Project, a 5-year NIH-funded study of risk and resilience factors related to PTSD (Binder et al., 2008, Bradley et al., 2008, Gillespie et al., 2009). Participants were recruited from the General Medical and Obstetric/Gynecological Clinics at a publicly funded, nonprofit healthcare system that serves a low-income population in Atlanta, Georgia. Interviewers approached participants waiting for appointments. Participants were

Results

In this sample, 19.2% of participants reported a history of moderate or severe childhood emotional abuse, 20.2% reported mild emotional abuse, and the other 60.7% reported no history of childhood emotional abuse. Mean BDI scores in our sample were 13.81. The mean score on the EDS was 37.52. Correlations between emotion dysregulation scores, CTQ subscores, and BDI scores are presented in Table 1. Analyses confirmed several of our hypotheses. All variables were correlated, and, as predicted,

Discussion

This study examined the relationships among childhood emotional abuse, adulthood depression, and emotion dysregulation in a mostly low-income, African American sample. Results provided support for increased depression symptoms and increased emotion dysregulation as a function of childhood trauma, and analyses confirmed that emotion dysregulation may be one mechanism through which childhood emotional abuse increases risk for depression. Consistent with some previous literature, this study also

Acknowledgments

We thank the Grady Trauma Project research staff and coordinators, Allen W. Graham and Angelo Brown, as well as the nurses in the Clinical Research Network of Grady Health Systems.

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    ☆

    This work was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health (MH071537), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (MH018264), Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award number UL1TR000454.

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