68 Chapter 3 driven by individual differences in childhood emotional maltreatment and to a lesser extent by self-esteem, depression, and anxiety. To further explore whether our results could be explained by other types of childhood maltreatment (i.e., physical abuse, physical neglect, and sexual abuse) we ran non-preregistered analyses in which we included these types of childhood maltreatment as covariates in the generalized linear mixed regression models when testing for the associations between CEM and 1) mood and 2) gaze behavior. All reported relationships between CEM and mood and gaze behavior as reported above remained intact. Furthermore, we controlled for physical abuse, physical neglect, and sexual abuse in the whole-brain regression analyses between CEM and neural responses to gazing into one’s own and another person’s eyes. The association between vmPFC activation and childhood emotional maltreatment remained significant after adding physical abuse and sexual abuse to the model, suggesting that this effect could not be (partly) explained by these types of childhood maltreatment. However, adding physical neglect to the regression model did not result in clusters that survived correction for multiple comparisons. On the one hand, this might suggest that physical neglect is, at least partly, associated with the enhanced vmPFC activation when participants are gazing into their own eyes in the task. On the other hand, considering that the severity of childhood maltreatment in this sample was mostly composed of emotional abuse, emotional neglect, and physical neglect, and to a lesser extent of physical abuse and sexual abuse, it might suggest a general effect of childhood maltreatment. As this cannot be disentangled based on the data of the current study, it is of interest to focus on this matter in a larger sample including a more balanced prevalence of all types of childhood maltreatment. Exploratory analyses In addition, we explored whether participants’ self-reported mood, gaze, and neural responses were uniquely associated with emotional abuse and emotional neglect. See Supplement S3.8 for a detailed overview of the results of these exploratory analyses. It should be noted that these analyses were not pre-registered and thus exploratory in nature. Our sample size was not a priori determined to have sufficient power to detect these nuanced effects. The results of these analyses need to be interpreted in the light of these limitations.
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