3 83 Looking into troubled waters: Childhood emotional maltreatment modulates neural responses to prolonged gazing into one’s own, but not others’, eyes There was also no significant three-way interaction between emotional neglect, gaze direction, and target, and no main effect of emotional abuse on participants’ gaze responses. We did not find a significant interaction between emotional neglect and gaze direction, nor between emotional neglect and target. Also, there was no three-way interaction between emotional abuse, gaze direction, and target, and main effect between emotional neglect and participants’ gaze responses. Neural responses Lastly, we examined whether emotional abuse and emotional neglect were associated with participants’ neural responses to a direct (minus averted) gaze of oneself and of an unfamiliar other (∆direct – averted gaze contrast). We found that more emotional neglect was associated with enhanced neural activation in right precentral gyrus. There was no significant correlation between emotional abuse and participants’ neural responses in the eye contact task, to none of the conditions. In line with the findings from the regression analysis including CEM, there were no significant results for the association between emotional abuse or emotional neglect and participants’ neural responses to a direct (minus) averted gaze of an unfamiliar other. The significant interaction between emotional neglect and gaze direction on participants’ mood is consistent with the results of analyses with the composite CEM score. These exploratory additional analyses seem to suggest that this specific effect may have been driven by emotional neglect and not, or to a lesser extent, by emotional abuse. In contrast, the significant interaction between emotional abuse and target on participants’ gaze responses is inconsistent with the results of analyses with the composite CEM score. The findings remained significant after controlling for all individual covariates, including all other childhood maltreatment types (i.e., gender, age, anxiety symptoms, depression symptoms, self-esteem, physical abuse, physical neglect, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and emotional neglect). 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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