Associations between childhood maltreatment and responding to signals of threat and safety in a fear conditioning paradigm
Project Description
This project investigates how early adversity—an important risk factor for a range of mental health disorders—affects fear learning, generalization and return of fear processes. While patients with anxiety disorders typically show heightened responses to safety cues, previous work suggests that individuals exposed to early adversity may instead be characterized by blunted responses to danger cues, leading to reduced discrimination between safety and threat (for a review see Ruge et al., 2024). In a large cohort (N=180), we combined psychophysiological (SCR, startle), neuroimaging (fMRI) while considering mental health diagnoses and the global assessment of functioning. Preliminary results confirm reduced fear discrimination driven by diminished CS+ responses in individuals exposed to early adversity, with no significant effect of lifetime mental health diagnoses was observed. In addition, we employed item-based content analyses exploring the item and hence content overlap across a wide range of questionnaires used to assess exposure to early adversity (Koppold, Ruge, Hecker & Lonsdorf, 2024).
