Emotional abuse is a widespread, elusive and insidious problem. Psychiatric disorders emerge through the interaction of genetic and experiential factors. Childhood maltreatment is a major experimental risk factor for the later development of mood, anxiety, dissociate, substance abuse, and personality problems. Emotional abuse in particular appears to be among the most prevalent forms of maltreatment, even more pervasive than physical and sexual abuse. Much remains to be discovered about the neurobiologcal consequences of emotional abuse in the absence of other forms of maltreatment. This proposal aims to test the main hypothesis that adults who have been exposed to emotional maltreatment during childhood have abnormalities in brain regions that regulate emotion, aggression and cognition. Vulnerable targets include the corpus callosum, cerebellar vermis, neocortex, and amygdala. Four groups of 30 subjects (15M/15F) will be studied; those with no history of childhood abuse; those with a history of verbal abuse; those who visually witnessed domestic violence; and those who were exposed to verbal abuse and who witnessed domestic violence. Structure and function of the regions of interest will be assessed using morphometric MRI, diffusion tensor imaging, functional MRI (T2 relaxometry) and MR spectroscopy to determine N-acetylaspartate to creatine ratios as an indicator of neuronal density and functioning. We will test the hypotheses that emotional abuse adversely effects the structural development of these regions, and results in functional consequences. Further, we predict that combined exposure to verbal abuse and witnessing domestic violence will have a greater impact than exposure to one or the other alone. Finally, the proposed model predicts that verbal aggression will exert greater effects on left hemisphere structures while visual exposure to domestic violence will exert greater effects on right hemisphere structures.
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