Poster No:
435
Submission Type:
Abstract Submission
Authors:
Isabella Breukelaar1, Trevor Steward2, Caio Seguin3, Kim Felmingham2, Leanne Williams4, Mayuresh Korgaonkar5, Richard Bryant6
Institutions:
1Westmead Institute for Medical Research, Petersham, NSW, 2University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, 3Systems Lab, Department of Psychiatry, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, 4Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 5Westmead institute, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 6University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW
First Author:
Co-Author(s):
Caio Seguin
Systems Lab, Department of Psychiatry, The University of Melbourne
Melbourne, Australia
Introduction:
It is estimated that over 20% of children experience sexual, physical, or emotional abuse (Bellis et al., 2019). Childhood abuse is associated with increased risk for and severity of psychiatric disorders (McCrory et al., 2017), as well as earlier onset, increased comorbidities, higher suicide risk, and poorer treatment response (Teicher and Samson, 2013). Previous neuroimaging studies of localised activity in responses to specific emotions (Bérubé et al., 2023) suggest that this predisposition for mental illness may partly stem from heightened sensitivity to negative emotional stimuli, such as sad or fearful faces, which increases psychological distress (McLaughlin et al., 2019). However, the impact of childhood abuse on large-scale brain organisation during emotion processing remains unexplored. In this study, we assess contextual changes in whole-brain functional connectivity during the viewing of supraliminal and subliminal emotional faces in a large transdiagnostic sample of adults with a history of childhood abuse.
Methods:
We recruited 236 adults (mean (sd) age, 35.4 (12.8), 61% female) who reported a history of neglect, or sexual, physical, or emotional abuse before age 18, along with 399 adults (mean (sd) age, 31.8 (11.1), 51% female) with history of abuse. All participants underwent a fMRI scan and a psychiatric interview to determine diagnosis. Imaging included a T1-wieghted structural scan and two 5-minute passive emotion viewing task designed to elicit supraliminal and subliminal processing respectively. The task involved neutral, happy, sad, angry, fearful, and disgusted faces. Standard pre-processing steps we applied including co-registration, slice-time correction, normalisation, smoothing and motion correction (Korgaonkar et al., 2019). The mean bold signal of 436 brain regions (based on the Schaefer atlas) was extracted, encompassing intra and inter-network connectivity across eight large-scale brain networks. A generalized psychophysiological interaction (gPPI) model was used to construct context-dependent matrices for each task condition. Differences between abused and non-abused participants for each emotion and task using network-based statistics at a family-wise error rate of p<0.05.
Results:
Participants with a history of childhood abuse were older (p<0.001), more female (p=0.010), less educated (p=0.003) and exhibited higher rates of psychiatric diagnoses (p<0.001), and symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress (p<0.001) compared to the non-abused group. No significant group differences were observed during supraliminal face viewing. However, for subliminal face viewing significant whole-brain gPPI connectivity differences emerged for sad (abuse > no abuse, p=0.0308, 227 connections) and disgusted faces (no abuse > abuse, 495 connections, p=0.0112), after controlling for age, sex, education, and diagnosis. Sad-face-associated networks involved connections within and between the somatomotor, frontoparietal, and visual networks. Disgust-face-associated networks were primarily characterized by visual and subcortical connections, as well as somatomotor connections with attention networks and frontoparietal network.
Conclusions:
Our findings suggest that adults with a history of childhood abuse exhibit altered functional brain organization in response to subliminal emotional stimuli, specifically sad and disgusted faces. Abused participants displayed increased connectivity of sensory and control networks in response to sad faces and decreased connectivity of sensory, subcortical, attention and control networks in response to disgusted faces. These connectivity changes may support evidence for suboptimal and negatively attuned emotional processing systems, potentially contributing to heightened risk for psychiatric disorders in this population.
Disorders of the Nervous System:
Psychiatric (eg. Depression, Anxiety, Schizophrenia) 1
Emotion, Motivation and Social Neuroscience:
Emotional Perception
Modeling and Analysis Methods:
fMRI Connectivity and Network Modeling 2
Keywords:
Emotions
FUNCTIONAL MRI
Psychiatric Disorders
Trauma
1|2Indicates the priority used for review
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Please indicate below if your study was a "resting state" or "task-activation” study.
Task-activation
Healthy subjects only or patients (note that patient studies may also involve healthy subjects):
Patients
Was this research conducted in the United States?
No
Were any human subjects research approved by the relevant Institutional Review Board or ethics panel?
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Yes
Were any animal research approved by the relevant IACUC or other animal research panel?
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Not applicable
Please indicate which methods were used in your research:
Functional MRI
Computational modeling
For human MRI, what field strength scanner do you use?
3.0T
Which processing packages did you use for your study?
SPM
Other, Please list
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NBS
Provide references using APA citation style.
1. Bellis, M. A. (2019). Life course health consequences and associated annual costs of adverse childhood experiences across Europe and North America: A systematic review and meta-analysis. The Lancet Public Health, 4(10), e517–e528.
2. Bérubé, A., Turgeon, J., Blais, C., & Fiset, D. (2023). Emotion recognition in adults with a history of childhood maltreatment: A systematic review. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 24(3), 278–294.
3. McCrory, E. J., Gerin, M. I., & Viding, E. (2017). Annual research review: Childhood maltreatment, latent vulnerability, and the shift to preventative psychiatry – The contribution of functional brain imaging. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 58(4), 338–357. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.12713
4. McFarlane, A., Clark, C. R., Bryant, R. A., Williams, L. M., Niaura, R., Paul, R. H., et al. (2005). The impact of early life stress on psychophysiological, personality, and behavioral measures in 740 non-clinical subjects. Journal of Integrative Neuroscience, 4(1), 27–40.
5. McLaughlin, K. A., Weissman, D., & Bitrán, D. (2019). Childhood adversity and neural development: A systematic review. Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, 1, 277–312.
6. Teicher, M. H., & Samson, J. A. (2013). Childhood maltreatment and psychopathology: A case for ecophenotypic variants as clinically and neurobiologically distinct subtypes. American Journal of Psychiatry, 170(11), 1114–1133.
7. Korgaonkar, M. S., et al. (2019). Amygdala activation and connectivity to emotional processing distinguishes asymptomatic patients with bipolar disorders and unipolar depression. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 4(4), 361–370.
No