62 Chapter 3 Figure 3.1 Screens and timings of an unfamiliar other displaying direct gaze and averted gaze in the eye contact task. The sex of the unfamiliar other target was matched with participants’ own sex. Childhood emotional maltreatment Participants’ self-reported childhood maltreatment was assessed with the Dutch version of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire Short Form prior to the scan session (CTQ-SF; (Arntz & Wessel, 1996; Bernstein et al., 2003)), and included the subscales: Emotional abuse (EN), emotional neglect (EN), physical abuse (PA), physical neglect (PN), and sexual abuse (SA). The present study focused on the subscales emotional abuse and emotional neglect of which the total scores were summed to create a composite score of childhood emotional maltreatment (CEM). This composite score could range between 10-50, with higher scores indicating more experienced CEM. Item examples of the EA subscale are: “My family said hurtful or insulting things to me” and “I thought that my parents wished I had never been born”. Item examples of the EN subscale are: “I felt loved” and “My family felt close to each other”. The subscales physical abuse, physical neglect, and sexual abuse were used as control variables in this study in order to examine to what extent potential findings were unique to the context of CEM. All subscales consist of five items, except for the SA scale which consisted of four items (item SA21 was removed, see Thombs et al. (2009)), and were answered on a Likert scale from 1 (never true) to 5 (very often true). The CTQ-SF is a sensitive and reliable questionnaire and has also been validated in a Dutch sample (Thombs et al., 2009). Internal consistencies in the current sample were α = 0.79 for EA, α = 0.89 for EN, and α = 0.89 for the composite score. We logtransformed the CEM composite score and all individual subscales to account for skewness in the data.
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