Childhood maltreatment linked to difficulty updating beliefs about strangers

A study conducted in Israel found that survivors of childhood maltreatment showed impaired belief updating when interacting with strangers. Moreover, in individuals with impaired belief updating, childhood maltreatment severity was associated with the severity of PTSD symptoms, while those with better updating showed low levels of PTSD symptoms regardless of the severity of childhood maltreatment they experienced. The research was published in Behaviour Research and Therapy.

Childhood maltreatment occurs when caregivers fail to provide safety, care, or emotional support, or actively cause harm to the child. Such experiences can disrupt normal emotional, cognitive, and social development. Childhood maltreatment is strongly associated with an increased risk for mental health disorders, including depression, anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and substance use disorders. It can also affect stress regulation systems, leading to long-term alterations in brain development and stress hormone functioning.

Individuals exposed to maltreatment often show difficulties with emotion regulation, self-esteem, and interpersonal relationships. Cognitive effects include problems with attention, memory, and executive functioning. Childhood maltreatment is also linked to a higher risk of physical health problems later in life, such as cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders, and chronic inflammation. The impact of maltreatment varies depending on its type, severity, duration, and the presence of protective factors like supportive relationships.

Study author Shir Porat-Butman and her colleagues note that, among other issues, survivors of childhood maltreatment show greater interpersonal distance. The authors reason that this might be because of their inability to distinguish between friends and strangers, due to a rigid interpersonal style that fails to adapt flexibly to varying levels of relational closeness.

With this in mind, the researchers conducted a study aiming to test whether adults with a history of childhood maltreatment show alterations in learning new positive and negative information about friends and strangers. They also wanted to see whether childhood maltreatment was associated with difficulties in updating social beliefs about friends and strangers when confronted with inconsistent information.

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Study participants were 114 individuals recruited from the general population. The authors note that the study was conducted during an ongoing war, meaning that all participants were exposed to additional trauma. Participants’ average age was 28 years**, and** 70% were female.

Participants completed assessments of childhood maltreatment (the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire), PTSD symptoms (the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Checklist), social anxiety symptoms (the Mini Social Phobia Inventory), anxiety and depression symptoms (the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale), and cumulative traumatic exposure (the Cumulative Traumatic Exposure Questionnaire).

They also completed the Friend-Stranger Social Updating task. In this task, participants are shown pictures of faces labeled either “friends” or “strangers.” Participants have to decide whether to approach or avoid the person.

If they decide to approach, they can either gain or lose points. If they decide to avoid, they neither lose nor gain points. Half of the faces (of both “strangers” and “friends”) are associated with gaining points after approaching them, and approaching the other half of faces loses points.

Crucially, the task includes a second phase (the updating phase). After participants learn these associations, the outcomes are reversed without warning: faces previously associated with gains result in losses, and vice versa. Participants must realize this change and adjust their choices. In this way, the assessment tests participants’ capacity to update beliefs about other people when provided with new, contradictory information.

Results showed that, in general, participants were better at learning after receiving points than after losing them. They were also better at learning when pictures were labeled as “friends” than when they were labeled as “strangers.”

Childhood maltreatment experiences were not associated with the initial formation of beliefs (learning who to avoid or approach in the first phase). However, participants with more severe childhood maltreatment history tended to show impaired updating of beliefs when interacting with strangers. In other words, once the rules changed, they were less efficient in updating their beliefs about which of the “stranger” pictures were now safe or unsafe.

Moreover, this impaired updating of beliefs moderated the association between childhood maltreatment and PTSD symptom severity. In individuals with impaired updating of beliefs, more severe childhood maltreatment was associated with more severe PTSD symptoms. On the other hand, participants with flexible updating of beliefs reported low PTSD symptom levels regardless of childhood maltreatment severity.

“These findings suggest that CM [childhood maltreatment] may disrupt adaptive belief updating in interpersonal contexts, contributing to later vulnerability to psychopathology. The results highlight the potential value of targeting social cognitive processes, particularly belief updating, in interventions aimed at improving social functioning and psychological resilience among individuals with a history of CM,” the study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the consequences of childhood maltreatment. However, it should be noted that the assessment of childhood maltreatment used in this study was based on the recall of childhood experiences when the participants were already adults. This means that results might have been affected by recall and reporting bias.

The paper, “From maltreatment to mistrust: Impaired belief updating as a mechanism linking childhood maltreatment to interpersonal and clinical outcomes,” was authored by Shir Porat-Butman, Görkem Ayas, Stefanie Rita Balle, Julia Carranza-Neira, Natalia E. Fares-Otero, Alla Hemi, Billy Jansson, Antonia Lüönd, Tanja Michael, Dany Laure Wadji, Misari Oe, Roxanne M. Sopp, Tanya Tandon, Ulrich Schnyder, Monique Pfaltz, and Einat Levy-Gigi.