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Updated: May 13, 2026
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Measurement of Fronto-limbic Activity Using an Emotional Oddball Task in Children with Familial High Risk for Schizophrenia
Published on: December 2, 2015
Amygdala activation in maltreated children during pre-attentive emotional processing
Eamon J McCrory1, Stéphane A De Brito, Philip A Kelly
1Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London and The Anna Freud Centre, London, UK. e.mccrory@ucl.ac.uk
Summary
Childhood maltreatment heightens neural responses to emotional faces, even when presented outside awareness. This heightened amygdala activation may be a risk factor for future psychiatric disorders in children.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Child Psychology
- Psychiatric Research
Background:
- Childhood adversity significantly increases the risk of psychiatric disorders.
- Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies primarily focused on institutionalized children and conscious affect processing.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate neural responses to pre-attentive affect cues in children with documented home maltreatment experiences.
- To compare brain activity in maltreated children versus carefully matched non-maltreated peers.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a masked dot-probe paradigm with pre-attentive presentation of angry, happy, and neutral facial expressions.
- Compared brain activity in 18 maltreated children and 23 non-maltreated controls.
Main Results:
- Maltreated children showed increased neural response in the right amygdala to both angry and happy faces presented pre-attentively.
- Higher amygdala activation was negatively correlated with earlier age of onset for specific abuse subtypes.
Conclusions:
- Childhood maltreatment is linked to heightened neural responses to both positive and negative facial affect, even for stimuli processed outside conscious awareness.
- This observed neural response pattern may serve as a latent risk factor for the development of future psychiatric disorders.
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