Low Flexibility of Emotion Regulation in Adults with Childhood Maltreatment Experiences

Background: Childhood maltreatment is associated with a higher risk for developing psychological disorders, such as depression or anxiety. Dysfunctional emotion regulation (ER) has been implicated as a neurocognitive mechanism linking adverse childhood experiences to an increased risk for psychopathological outcomes. Objective: This preregistered study investigated the relation between childhood maltreatment and different aspects of ER, including implementation capacity and effort as well as tendency and flexibility in strategy selection. Methods: In a non-clinical adult sample (N = 227), childhood maltreatment was assessed with the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. In two experimental ER tasks, participants viewed pictures of varying emotional intensity while applying one of three ER strategies (distraction, reappraisal, suppression) or without any active regulation. The ER implementation task allowed to assess emotion reactivity, implementation capacity, and subjective effort for ER. The ER selection task allowed to assess tendency and flexibility in strategy selection. Results: Childhood maltreatment was associated with a lower capacity to implement reappraisal (r = -.12), a stronger tendency to choose suppression (r = .15), and lower flexibility in ER strategy selection (r = -.12). Contrary to our hypotheses, there was no significant association to experimentally assessed emotion reactivity or subjective effort exerted on ER. Conclusions: We show that people with childhood maltreatment experiences do not only choose suppression more frequently but seem to have a deficit in flexibly adjusting strategy selection to context factors, e.g., stimulus intensity. This can be interpreted as an important factor rendering emotion regulation less adaptive in a clinical sense.