3 71 Looking into troubled waters: Childhood emotional maltreatment modulates neural responses to prolonged gazing into one’s own, but not others’, eyes to examine the unique (neural) correlates of the impact of emotional abuse and neglect on participants’ responses to eye contact in a larger sample. Our results show that childhood emotional maltreatment is associated with enhanced neural responses to one’s own gaze. This impact on self-related processing seemed more pronounced for automatic processes (i.e., neural responses) and may be associated with more spontaneous affective reactions in people reporting more emotional maltreatment when gazing into one’s own eyes (e.g., sadness or self-loathing). Future studies should investigate whether treatments that focus on the strengthening of participants’ self-views (e.g., mindfulness-based cognitive therapy focused on negative self-referential processing or self-esteem training (Korrelboom et al., 2012; Lovas & Schuman-Olivier, 2018)) are beneficial for people who experienced CEM and whether such therapeutic interventions are able to normalize their behavioral and neural responses when connecting with oneself.
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