Experiencing Abuse Or Neglect As A Child Research Paper

Experiencing abuse or neglect as a child can have some kind effect on that individual in their later lives, depression for example. In the article "The Role of Childhood Abuse and Neglect in the Sensitization to Stressful Life Events in Adolescent Depression,” found in Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2006, Vol. 155, No. 4 730-741. by authors Kate L. Harkness, Alanna E. Bruce and Margaret N. Lumley predicted that among those depressed adolescents, history of childhood abuse/neglect would be associated with a low level of event threat prior to onset, particularly among adolescence with recurrent episodes of depression. After conducting a natural experiment, they conclude that adolescents with a history of childhood abuse and/or neglect reported low levels of threat of stressful events prior to episode onset than those without a history. This article produced significate results that supported the hypothesis. This article is perfectly executed as it is well written, cites facts and statistics and sufficient research was provided for the article to be comprehensible. 

The article is about the impact depression can have on an individual that has experienced childhood abuse/neglect. This natural experiment was conducted at Queen’s University. For this experiment, it was limited to a small to a small city and 103 participants from Ontario, Canada. 98% of the participations were white while other 2% were Asian or Hispanic. Participants in the depressed group were ages 13-18 already in a current episode of depression but without mania, psychosis or conduct disorder. They were referred from community health agencies and recruited from a local high school. While participants in the nondepression group were recruited from local high schools. The participants in the depression group were required to meet a certain criteria from the American Psychiatric Manual of Mental Disorder that shows a current episode of a nonbipolar mood disorder with a duration of less than 2 years. On the other hand, participants in the nondepression group must have a clear history of psychiatric diagnosis. Any participant whether from the depression or nondepression groups that had a psychotic disorder, bipolar disorder, development disability, medical disorder, substance dependence or conduct disorder that can result in depression or acute suicidality, will be excluded from the experiment. Lastly, in the process of the experiment participants participated in the diagnostic interview and questionnaire, 1-2 weeks later the life event and childhood history interview were conducted. 

Participants in the “first onset” and “recurrent” group reported high levels of stress and maltreatment than reports made by the nondepressed group. Also, those that reported maltreatment had high levels of chronic difficulty threat which was related to a high threat rating of independent events. This bought to the researchers attention that they should include chronic difficulties in their models. Maltreatment requires a low threatening level of stress to onset an episode due to the sensitizing effect it has. If the effect of maltreatment were to be examined in terms of occurrence versus nonoccurrence, it would be found that stress triggers are not required for individual that are sensitized to depression. Participants that experience their first onset with child maltreatment, were three times less likely to have an independent event prior to the onset than participants without maltreatment. 

This article focused on the role childhood abuse/neglect has on that individual in the adolescent stage. Their findings were accurate with the stress sensitization hypothesis that adolescents reporting childhood abuse/neglect had a lower threat level of independent life events prior to the first depression episode onset than those without early history. Those with a history of trauma have been sensitize to the effect of independence events, that a low level of threat of events will precipitate the onset of their first depression. Adolescents with history of abuse/neglect reported high levels of chronic difficulties. Stress sensitization due to childhood maltreatment may not be work entirely through the generation of chronic difficulties, the effects was robust when controlling the level of chronic difficulty threat. This finding strengthens the hypothesis. It is more likely that independent events will be the onset of depression in adolescents than dependent events. Because many participants had no independent events in 3 months prior to the onset of depression, it is uncertain if the sensitizing effect of an individual's childhood history will lower the event threat that’ll precipitate onset. Further research with larger samples is necessary to find out what triggers depression in those individuals with no independent event threat. The findings show that more females were in the depressed group and reported more history of childhood abuse/neglect than boys.  due to the fact that there were very few males that took part in the experiment, sex was not a significant covariate in any analyses.