Abstract

Childhood trauma, and in particular physical neglect, has been repeatedly associated with lower performance on measures of social cognition (e.g. emotion recognition tasks) in both psychiatric and non-clinical populations. The neural mechanisms underpinning this association have remained unclear. Here, we investigated whether volumetric changes in three stress-sensitive regions—the amygdala, hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)—mediate the association between childhood trauma and emotion recognition in a healthy participant sample (N = 112) and a clinical sample of patients with schizophrenia (N = 46). Direct effects of childhood trauma, specifically physical neglect, on Emotion Recognition Task were observed in the whole sample. In healthy participants, reduced total and left ACC volumes were observed to fully mediate the association between both physical neglect and total childhood trauma score, and emotion recognition. No mediating effects of the hippocampus and amygdala volumes were observed for either group. These results suggest that reduced ACC volume may represent part of the mechanism by which early life adversity results in poorer social cognitive function. Confirmation of the causal basis of this association would highlight the importance of resilience-building interventions to mitigate the detrimental effects of childhood trauma on brain structure and function.

中文翻译：

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精神分裂症患者和健康参与者的童年创伤，脑结构和情绪识别

摘要

在精神病患者和非临床人群中，儿童创伤，尤其是身体上的疏忽，屡屡与社会认知测量（例如情感识别任务）表现不佳有关。支持这种关联的神经机制仍不清楚。在这里，我们调查了健康参与者样本（N  = 112）和临床样本的三个压力敏感区域（杏仁核，海马体和前扣带回皮质（ACC））的体积变化是否介导了童年创伤与情绪识别之间的关联。精神分裂症患者（ñ = 46）。在整个样本中，观察到了童年创伤，特别是身体上的疏忽对情绪识别任务的直接影响。在健康的参与者中，观察到总的ACC量和左侧的ACC量减少，可以完全介导身体疏忽和儿童期创伤总评分与情感识别之间的关联。两组均未观察到海马和杏仁核体积的介导作用。这些结果表明，减少的ACC量可能代表了早期生活逆境导致较差的社会认知功能的部分机制。这种联系的因果关系的确认将突出强调建立复原力干预措施的重要性，以减轻儿童期创伤对大脑结构和功能的有害影响。