3 67 Looking into troubled waters: Childhood emotional maltreatment modulates neural responses to prolonged gazing into one’s own, but not others’, eyes Figure 3.4 CEM was associated with increased vmPFC activity when looking into one’s own eyes. A wholebrain regression analysis testing for a positive association between CEM and neural responses to participants’ own direct gaze (Δ direct gaze – averted gaze) yielded a significant cluster in vmPFC (MNI-coordinate [14, 48, -8], Z = 3.98, k = 771, pFWE-corr = .032 at cluster level). To visualize this association, we plotted parameter estimates in this region against self-reported CEM scores of participants. Regression lines are plotted for illustration purposes only. Whole-brain analyses were thresholded at p <.05 (FSW cluster-corrected using a cluster-forming threshold of p <.001). Covariate analyses Given the associations between CEM and self-esteem (r = -0.37, p <.001) and symptom severity of anxiety (r = 0.34, p = .002) and depression (r = 0.23, p = .043) in the current sample (Supplement S3.6), we ran a set of analyses to elucidate whether these measures might mediate the reported associations. All analyses were also controlled for participants’ sex and neuroimaging analyses were additionally controlled for handedness (left/right) and psychotropic medication status (yes/no) (see Supplement S3.7 for detailed information about these measures). Associations between CEM and participants’ mood responses remained significant after controlling for participants’ sex, anxiety- or depression symptom severity, and self-esteem. The association between CEM and enhanced vmPFC activation in response to participants’ own direct gaze remained significant after controlling for sex and handedness, but was no longer significant when separately controlling for psychotropic medication status, severity of anxiety or depression symptoms, or self-esteem levels. We used a method to examine the sequential contribution of each of the regressors and averaged them over all possible sequential orderings to calculate the relative importance of each regressor (Relaimpo package in R). This analysis showed that childhood emotional maltreatment explained most of the variance (82.12%) of the relationship between childhood emotional maltreatment levels and enhanced vmPFC activation. Self-esteem explained 10.49%, anxiety severity explained 4.72%, and depression severity explained 2.67%. Together this shows that variance in vmPFC to one’s own gaze is mostly
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