Subjective feelings of disconnectedness from social groups have been found to be detrimental to mental health. However, little is known about the factors determining people’s ability to attach to groups. We contend that child maltreatment will impair people’s ability to group identification across the lifespan, and present a cross‐sectional study involving 396 young adults from Spain, aimed at testing this hypothesis. Results reveal that, as expected, a greater degree of maltreatment received before the age of 14 is linked to a lower number of social groups one identifies with, even after controlling for current levels of depression, anxiety, and borderline personality.

中文翻译：

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虐待儿童与在年轻时难以与社会群体认同有关

已发现与社会群体脱节的主观感觉对心理健康有害。然而，人们对决定人们依附于群体的能力的因素知之甚少。我们认为虐待儿童会损害人们在整个生命周期中进行群体识别的能力，并提出了一项涉及 396 名西班牙年轻人的横断面研究，旨在验证这一假设。结果表明，正如预期的那样，即使在控制了当前的抑郁、焦虑和边缘人格水平之后，14 岁之前受到的更大程度的虐待与一个人所认同的社会群体数量较少有关。