Childhood maltreatment and expressive flexibility: specific effects of threat and deprivation?

While childhood maltreatment has been consistently associated with a high risk for psychopathology, the mechanisms underlying this relation are still unclear. Dysfunctional emotion regulation has been singled out as a potential mechanism and recent perspectives emphasise the importance of measuring flexibility over habitual patterns of regulating strategies when assessing it. The present study has investigated the relation between childhood maltreatment and expressive flexibility, the ability to control emotional expression according to situational demands. Participants completed a retrospective self-report maltreatment questionnaire, which measured levels of childhood abuse and neglect, and an experimental task, which measured expressive flexibility. Depressive symptoms and trait anxiety were also evaluated. Results indicated an association between childhood maltreatment and reduced expressive flexibility. When investigated separately, both abuse and neglect were associated with reduced expressive flexibility, but when analyzed concurrently, only the former relation remained significant. Expressive flexibility negatively correlated with depressive symptoms. Our findings suggest that childhood maltreatment, a distal risk factor for psychopathology, impacts expressive flexibility, a form of emotion regulation flexibility.