Affective responsiveness, betrayal, and childhood abuse.

Several trauma-specific and emotion theories suggest that alterations in children's typical affective responses may serve an attachment function in the context of abuse by a caregiver or close other. For example, inhibiting negative emotional responses or expressions might help the child preserve a relationship with an abusive caregiver. Past research in this area has relied on self-report methods to discover links between affective responsiveness and caregiver abuse. Extending this literature, the current study used facial electromyography to assess affective responsiveness with 2 measures: mimicry of emotional facial expressions and affective modulation of startle. We predicted that women who reported childhood abuse by close others would show alterations in affective responsiveness relative to their peers. We tested 100 undergraduate women who reported histories of (a) childhood sexual or physical abuse by someone close, such as a parent (high-betrayal); (b) childhood abuse by someone not close (low-betrayal); or (c) no abuse in childhood (no-abuse). Especially when viewing women's emotional expressions, the high-betrayal group showed more mimicry of happy and less mimicry of angry faces relative to women who reported no- or low-betrayal abuse, who showed the opposite pattern. Furthermore, women who reported high-betrayal abuse showed less affective modulation of startle during pictures depicting men threatening women than did the other two groups. Findings suggest that, as predicted by betrayal trauma theory, women who have experienced high-betrayal abuse show alterations in automatic emotional processes consistent with caregiving-maintenance goals in an abusive environment.