Do single experiences of childhood abuse increase psychopathology symptoms in adulthood?

[Abstract:] "Experiencing emotional, physical, and/or sexual abuse in childhood increases the risk (compared with baseline) of developing psychopathological symptoms in adulthood. In the present study, we explored the effects of experiencing only a single abusive event on adulthood psychopathology, and compared this with the risk in individuals with no abusive experiences and with the risk in individuals with several abusive experiences. We used a Finnish populationbased sample of 10,980 adult participants (3,766 male and 7,214 female twins and their siblings). The participants reported abuse experiences using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) and current psychopathology symptoms using the depression and anxiety scales of the Brief Symptom Inventory-18 (BSI-18). We found that in both men and women even single experiences of emotional and sexual abuse were associated with increased psychopathology symptoms compared with no abuse experiences. Single experiences of physical abuse did not, however, increase the risk in either women or men. As expected, experiences of repeated abuse (of all abuse types) increased the risk of psychopathology symptoms compared with experiences of single abuse. When we isolated individuals who only had a single experience of any type of abuse (i.e., emotional, physical, or sexual) to control for possible co-morbidity, no increased risk was found. This study shows that individuals who report experiencing single events of abuse of a specific abuse type have an increased risk of displaying psychopathology symptoms in adulthood. This increase is, however, mainly due to co-morbidity of abuse types."

[Part of the results:]

"It is interesting to note that this study showed that a single experience of sexual abuse is associated with psychopathology in men and women in adulthood and that already a single experience had as negative effects as repeated experiences.

It is interesting - and surprising - that, when controlling for co-morbidity, a single experience of abuse is a significant predictor of lower levels of psychopathology in adulthood compared with those who had no experiences of any type of abuse. For both men and women, participants who had not experienced any abuse of any kind reported more adult psychopathology compared with participants who had experienced no more than one abuse incident of any kind. This result seems paradoxical in light of previous research. However, we hypothesized that a factor contributing to having no experience of abuse of any kind could be the (genetically determined) personality dimensions of introversion and neuroticism, as introversion would make a child less likely to evoke abusive behaviors whereas neuroticism would be reflected in higher psychopathology irrespective of abuse experiences. To address this post hoc explanation, we used available personality measures (measured by the Twelve-Item Personality Inventory {TIPI}; for example, Derogatis, 2001). The difference between the two groups did not remain significant when these two factors (i.e., introversion and neuroticism) were included as covariates supporting our hypothesis. In sum, these results mean that the paradoxical result could be, at least partly, explained by personality differences related to evocative effects.

To conclude, when controlling for co-morbidity, our analyses showed that a single abuse experience was not associated with psychopathology anymore. When the effects of co-morbidity are removed, a single experience in and of itself seems unlikely to have a negative effect on symptoms of psychopathology in adulthood. However, from a clinical standpoint, single experiences of one abuse type are likely to be co-morbid with experiences of other abuse types as a matter of statistical likelihood. This should be taken into account when evaluating the negative effects of also low levels of abuse."

source: Article 'Do Single Experiences of Childhood Abuse Increase Psychopathology Symptoms in Adulthood?' by Wail Rehan (MSc), Jan Antfolk (PhD), Ada Johansson (PhD) & Pekka Santtila (PhD); journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0886260516647004; www.boychat.org/messages/1525371.htm; Journal of Interpersonal Violence; First Published: 27 September 2016