As marcas invisíveis dos maus-tratos emocionais na infância: impactos no julgamento de faces neutras

Abstract

Facial expressions, such as happiness and sadness, are of great value for interactions and social communication. Due to their importance, they were studied in order to better understand the mechanism that underlines the perception and processing of facial expressions. It is known that facial expressions can be modulated by several factors, such as individual traits, traumatic experiences, psychiatric disorders and even the context in which they are inserted. However, no less important than emotional faces, neutral faces are extremely ambiguous stimuli and even more susceptible to modulation by the individual's experiences. One of the elements that may influence how neutral faces are perceived and evaluated is the history of childhood maltreatment. This study sought to understand whether a history of childhood emotional maltreatment (CEM) or childhood physical maltreatment (CPM) could be associated with a greater negative rating of neutral faces after a contextual manipulation. In the first experiment, the manipulation was carried out by presenting a negative text (about child sexual abuse) and as a control, another group of participants read a neutral text (about identity card). In the subsequent experiment, all participants performed behavioral tests divided into two tasks. In the first, participants were asked to judge the orientation of two peripheral bars that included neutral faces as distractions. In the second, participants were asked to judge the valence of the figures that were displayed, with neutral faces drawing the most attention. As the main result of this work, we observed that in the negative context, childhood emotional maltreatment was associated with more neutral faces judged as negative when compared to the group that had no history of emotional maltreatment (p = 0.046). As for childhood physical maltreatment, no association was observed in both the neutral and negative contexts (p > 0.1). Those results indicate how important it is to pay attention to CEM to raise awareness about its long-term impact on individuals' lives.