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Neural Mechanisms Promoting Biased Social Memories in Intergenerational Childhood Abuse
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2025-05
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Psychology
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https://doi.org/10.34944/gh4q-jz86
Abstract
Childhood abuse is associated with devastating public health outcomes and is often transmitted intergenerationally, leaving many families trapped in cycles of abuse. Because child abuse shapes and is shaped by social interactions, pinpointing effective intervention targets for disrupting these cycles requires the study of social processing mechanisms. This study investigates whether neural and cognitive biases in social processing – specifically, the encoding and recall of social feedback – serve as pathways linking childhood abuse histories to harsh parenting of the next generation. Using fMRI and a verifiable, ecologically valid social feedback task, we studied female caregivers of adolescents (N = 68) to test: (1) whether childhood abuse predicts a negativity bias in social memory, (2) whether anterior hippocampal activation during feedback encoding explains this relationship, and (3) whether a negativity bias in memory and anterior hippocampus activation mediate the relationship between childhood abuse and harsh parenting. Contrary to our hypotheses, childhood abuse was not associated with a social memory bias or anterior hippocampal activation during encoding. As a result, this mechanism did not mediate a relationship between childhood abuse history and current harsh parenting. Instead, neural responses to social feedback moderated the relationship between childhood abuse and harsh parenting, particularly in key regions implicated in social feedback processing and altered by childhood abuse. Specifically, heightened reactivity to negative social feedback in the anterior hippocampus, putamen, amygdala, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) appeared to potentiate the link between childhood abuse and harsh parenting, whereas heightened sensitivity in these regions to positive feedback appeared protective, eliminating the association. Crucially, these effects were specific to encoding social feedback and did not emerge in a non-social feedback domain. These findings suggest that social processing – particularly the neural encoding of social interactions – may function as a novel resilience mechanism in the intergenerational transmission of abuse, highlighting in-the-moment social reactivity as a promising target for future intervention research.
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