Hold me tight – The protective effects of secure attachment despite childhood maltreatment on behavioral phenotype and brain structure

COEX 

Childhood maltreatment is a traumatic interpersonal experience and survivors may struggle to form secure attachments even as adults. Securely attached individuals with childhood maltreatment can thus be described as interpersonally resilient. In my talk I will describe the interactive effects of attachment style and childhood maltreatment on phenotype and brain structural data using a sample of N = 1317 healthy adults with and without a history of depression. On a phenotypic level, interpersonally resilient individuals showed significantly lower self-reported (Beck Depression Inventory, BDI) and rater-based (Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, HAM-D) depressive scores. Interpersonally resilient individuals further presented with significantly larger gray matter volumes in the left supramarginal gyrus, part of the somatosensory association cortex and further considered to be part of the mirror neuron system. Increased volume in this area might constitute a neural compensatory mechanism to childhood maltreatment and aid securely attached, maltreated individuals in more adaptively processing semantic information and tactile sensory integration. Interpersonally resilient individuals had lower depressive scores, highlighting the importance of secure attachment as a resilience factor in mitigating the negative effects of childhood maltreatment. In my talk, I will discuss the implication of these findings and the necessity of including protective factors in research.