Childhood trauma has been considered to be a risk factor for psychiatric disorders. However, the mechanisms and pathways underlying the relationship between childhood trauma and psychiatric disorders yet to be fully understood such as the impact of different type of childhood trauma on different psychopathological dimensions. Dr. Raymond Chan from Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and his collaborators have recently shown that specific links between childhood trauma and psychopathological dimensions in a large group of non-clinical sample.

In order to further illustrate whether a similar but stronger connection would be exhibited by clinical populations, Dr. Chan and collaborators from Shanghai Mental Health Centre, Suzhou Guangji Hospital and the University of Hong Kong recruited 418 schizophrenia patients, 215 bipolar disorder patients, and 236 major depressive disorder patients, and conducted a network analysis at both dimension-level and item-level to specifically examine the network structure and interrelationship between childhood trauma, psychopathology and duration of illness.

Their findings showed that different types of childhood trauma exerted distinct impacts upon different psychopathological dimensions. Specifically, emotional neglect was associated with depressive symptoms and motivation and pleasure deficits factor of negative symptoms, physical neglect was associated with motivation and pleasure deficits factor, emotional abuse was associated with depressive symptoms, physical abuse was associated with excited symptoms, and sexual abuse was associated with positive and disorganized symptoms.

These findings supported the unique roles of childhood trauma upon psychopathological dimensions in patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder. One of the implications is to identify people with a history of childhood trauma and develop prompt management to alleviate and reverse the development of psychiatric symptoms.

Mr. Yi-hang Huang from Dr. Chan’s team was the first author of this study. Prof. Zheng-hui Yi from Shanghai Mental Health Centre, Prof. Li Hui from Suzhou Guangji Hospital and Dr. Raymond Chan from the Institute of Psychology were the co-senior authors of this study. This study was supported by the Jiangsu Provincial Key Research and Development Programme, the Science Foundation of Shanghai Mental Health Centre, the Scientific Foundation of Institute of Psychology, the Philip K. H. Wong Foundation, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai.  

This study is now published online in Schizophrenia Bulletin

-          Huang, Y. H., Liu, C., Zhang, J. B., Li, S. B., Wang, L. L., Hu, H. X., Cai, Y., Zhu, Z., Chu, M. Y., Wang, Y., Lv, Q. Y., Lui, S. S. Y., Yi, Z. H., Hui, L., Chan, R. C. K. (2024).A transdiagnostic network analysis of childhood trauma and psychopathology. Schizophrenia Bulletin.

Related publication:

-          Huang, Y. H., Hu, H. X., Wang, L. L., Zhang, Y. J., Wang, X., Wang, Y., Wang, Y., Wang, Y. Y., Lui, S. S. Y., Chan, R. C. K. (2023). Relationships between childhood trauma and dimensional schizotypy: A network analysis and replication. Asian Journal of Psychiatry, 85: 10359