Childhood trauma and health: an investigation of physiological, behavioral, cognitive, and emotional pathways.

Abstract

Childhood trauma poses serious risk for overall health. Prior research has identified major pathways connecting childhood trauma to increased risk for poor health across many domains of health. The current project builds on this literature. Some prior research suggests that physiological stress responses in adulthood are blunted for individuals who experience childhood trauma compared to those who have not. Theory suggests that different patterns of physiological stress reactivity may be linked to different perceptions of environmental demands and resources to cope. The project aimed to investigate childhood trauma and blunted physiological reactivity to stress mediated by dissociative responses. Dissociation is a psychological and physiological mechanism thought to protect an individual from stressors that are inescapable or outweigh an individual's abilities to overcome stress. Separately, the perception of childhood trauma burden later in life may predict the degree to which childhood trauma affect health-relevant outcomes in adulthood. Previous research has shown that individuals who perceived their childhood trauma as more burdensome may be at higher risk for poor mental health. In separate research, emotion regulation strategy usage is related to mental health. The possibility exists that differences in childhood trauma burden and emotion regulation strategies used to cope with emotions may interact to inform differences in mental health. The current project addresses the following. Study 1 tested whether childhood trauma is linked to blunted physiological responses to a social-evaluative in-lab stressor, and proposed to test whether this relationship is in part mediated by increased dissociative responses to the stressor. Study 2 tested whether childhood trauma was linked to more dissociative responses to daily stressors, and whether childhood trauma and dissociative responses to daily stressors interacted to predict objective markers of sleep quality in a 6-day data collection period. Study 3 explored the relationship between perceived childhood trauma burden, emotion regulations strategies, and mental health in a sample of American Indian adults nationwide. The findings from Study 1+2 did not confirm hypotheses. The implications of the results are discussed. Study 3 was exploratory and the observed results are discussed. The implications, limitations, and future directions for the 3-part study results are discussed.