Fear Biases in Emotional Face Processing Following Childhood Trauma as a Marker of Resilience and Vulnerability to Depression

Abstract

There is a high prevalence of depression in adults with a history of childhood maltreatment. A negative cognitive bias is implicated in the etiology of depressive symptomatology and has also been found in physically abused children who show preferential processing of anger. However, how these biases mediate the link between childhood maltreatment and adult depression has not yet been clarified. This study involved 36 patients with depression (19 with and 17 without a history of childhood maltreatment) and 40 healthy controls (18 with and 22 without a history of childhood maltreatment). All participants were assessed using a facial emotion recognition task. Healthy individuals with a history of childhood maltreatment made significantly more errors in recognizing fear than anger. This difference between the number of errors for fear and anger was higher in healthy abused individuals than healthy nonabused individuals and depressed abused individuals. Resilient individuals with a history of childhood maltreatment but who have not developed depression show absence of a fear bias, which may help explain why they do not manifest depressive symptoms, despite their experiences of childhood maltreatment. In contrast, other individuals who become vulnerable to depression after childhood maltreatment show an amplified bias toward fear.