Attention to facial emotions in adult women varies by type and severity of childhood maltreatment experience and emotion regulation strategy

Abstract

Abstract Little eye-tracking research has been conducted so far on the association of subtypes of childhood maltreatment and habitual emotion regulation with attention to emotions. To address this issue, gaze behavior of one hundred women with experiences of childhood maltreatment was examined in a free-viewing task in which pairs of faces consisting of an emotional (happy, surprised, angry, disgusted, fearful, and sad) and a neutral face were displayed. Participants’ childhood maltreatment experiences, emotion regulation strategies (reappraisal and suppression), anxiety, depression, stress perception, level of alexithymia, and intelligence were assessed. Fixation durations were used to assess attentional bias. A mixed linear model with post-hoc pairwise comparisons was used to investigate research questions. Results indicated that, at high levels of maltreatment severity, attentional preference for positive over other emotional faces was found to be diminished for physical and emotional abuse but not for emotional neglect. At a severe level of emotional abuse, a bias away from disgusted faces was observed. Suppression was linked to reduced and reappraisal was related to heightened attention allocation to facial emotions. Our data indicates that attention to social emotional information in adulthood could depend on the type and severity of childhood trauma and habitual emotion regulation strategy.