Abstract
BackgroundPrevious studies reported that social phobia is associated with a history of child maltreatment. However, most of these studies focused on physical and sexual maltreatment whilst little is known about the specific impact of emotional abuse and neglect on social anxiety. We examined the association between emotional maltreatment, including parental emotional maltreatment as well as emotional peer victimization, and social anxiety symptoms in subjects with various degrees of social anxiety.MethodsThe study was conducted as a web-based Internet survey of participants (N = 995) who had social anxiety symptoms falling within the high range, and including many respondents who had scores in the clinical range. The assessment included measures of child maltreatment, emotional peer victimization, social anxiety symptoms and general psychopathology.ResultsRegression and mediation analyses revealed that parental emotional maltreatment and emotional peer victimization were independently related to social anxiety and mediated the impact of physical and sexual maltreatment. Subjects with a history of childhood emotional maltreatment showed higher rates of psychopathology than subjects with a history of physical maltreatment.ConclusionsAlthough our findings are limited by the use of an Internet survey and retrospective self-report measures, data indicated that social anxiety symptoms are mainly predicted by emotional rather than physical or sexual types of victimization.
Highlights
Previous studies reported that social phobia is associated with a history of child maltreatment
We aimed to explore the specific impact of emotional types of illtreatment, including emotional abuse and neglect within the family as well as emotional peer victimization
We found 703 subjects (70.76%) meeting Walker’s threshold severity criteria for at least one type of childhood abuse or neglect, as measured by the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) subscales
Summary
Previous studies reported that social phobia is associated with a history of child maltreatment. Abusive treatment that does not involve any physical transgression by a caregiver but is characterized instead by acts such as verbal hostility, taunting, belittling, rejection as well as emotionally neglectful parenting that is unavailable, detached, avoidant and unresponsive to the child’s needs and desires [6] is maltreatment. These types of abuse have been called emotional maltreatment [7], which can be subdivided into emotional abuse and neglect. This denomination may be considered somewhat unfortunate (since any type of abuse has an emotional impact), it is well established in the scientific literature
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