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Childhood Maltreatment and Depressotypic Cognitive Organization

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Abstract

Recent research suggests that how information is organized in the mind may be important for determining one’s vulnerability to depression. The purpose of the current study was to examine potential developmental precursors to a depressotypic cognitive organization (i.e., tightly-connected negative schemas and loosely-connected positive schemas) in a sample of young adult men and women (N = 91). The relation between childhood maltreatment (i.e., mother emotional maltreatment, father emotional maltreatment, physical abuse, and sexual abuse) and cognitive organization was assessed using a computer task in which participants with different self-reported maltreatment histories plotted a series of cognitive schema contents (e.g., “I am a failure”) on a 2-dimensional grid along the dimensions of self-descriptiveness and valence. As hypothesized, higher levels of mother emotional maltreatment, father emotional maltreatment and physical abuse (but not sexual abuse) were associated with a depressotypic schema organization. Consistent with hypotheses, a depressotypic schema organization mediated the relation between maltreatment and depression, suggesting that the organization of cognitive schemas may help to elucidate why individuals with maltreatment histories are so vulnerable to develop depression.

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Notes

  1. Although this research does not consider actual neurological structures in the brain, there is a growing area of research examining environmental experience (particularly early childhood experiences) on brain development (for review see Siegel 1999).

  2. It is noteworthy that 34% of participants met criteria for past or current major depression in this study, despite no special measures to recruit depressed participants. One possibility is that potential participants with maltreatment histories were more likely to agree to participate when contacted and given the brief description, “this project investigates how childhood experiences relate to your thinking and mood”. Given the strong association between maltreatment and depression, having a higher ratio of maltreated individuals in the study may have inadvertently increased the ratio of past- or current-depressed to never-depressed participants.

  3. Although the use of the Sable test has been criticized as overly conservative, especially in relatively small samples (Preacher and Hayes 2004), nonparametric approaches such as Shrout and Bolger’s bootstrapping approach (2002) are not appropriate for use with dichotomous outcomes variables. Due to concerns about power and the conservative nature of the Sobel test, we applied no further correction of alpha in the current investigation.

  4. The past- and current-depressed groups did not differ in reported levels of M-EMT (M s = 36.29, 35.24, SD s = 14.44, 11.91; t (28) = −.76, p = .45) or F-EMT (M s = 43.69, 47.69 SD s = 13.23, 16.00; t (28) = .74, p = .47), thus further supporting our decision to combine them in these analyses.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council: Canada Graduate Scholarship (first author). We are very grateful to the participants of this project for their willingness to report difficult childhood experiences. We also wish to thank Drs. John Abela, David Dozois, Kevin Parker, and Uzma Rehman for their helpful comments on this research. We are grateful to Kelly Anthony-Brown and Faye Ling for scheduling participants and data entry, and to James Kempson for his computer-programming expertise.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, N1G 2W1, Canada

    Margaret N. Lumley

  2. Department of Psychology, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, K7L 3N6, Canada

    Kate L. Harkness

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  1. Margaret N. Lumley
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  2. Kate L. Harkness
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Correspondence to Margaret N. Lumley.

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Lumley, M.N., Harkness, K.L. Childhood Maltreatment and Depressotypic Cognitive Organization. Cogn Ther Res 33, 511–522 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-009-9257-7

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