Effects of Childhood Trauma on Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future in Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia exhibits impairments in remembering the past (autobiographical memory, AM) and imagining the future (episodic future thinking, EFT). Childhood trauma is also associated with deficits in AM and EFT. However, it is not clear whether childhood trauma is associated with severer deficits in AM and EFT in schizophrenia. The present study aimed to examine the effect of childhood trauma on AM and EFT in schizophrenia. We recruited 41 schizophrenia patients with childhood trauma (SCZ + CT), 19 schizophrenia patients without childhood trauma (SCZ - CT), and 40 healthy controls (HC) to participate in this study. Participants underwent the autobiographical interview task, in which they were required to remember or imagine the most important events that occurred or would occur at different times and describe them. Results showed that SCZ + CT exhibited fewer internal details, and lower specificity, time/place richness, and thought/emotion richness in both AM and EFT compared with HC. Meanwhile, SCZ - CT showed lower time/place richness and thought/emotion richness in AM and EFT than HC. However, no significant difference was found between the two patient groups. In addition, AM showed more internal details and stronger phenomenological characteristics (e.g., specificity, time/place richness, etc.) than EFT, while EFT was more positive and important than AM in all participants. Both SCZ + CT and SCZ - CT groups exhibited AM and EFT impairments, and the SCZ + CT group had wider impairments than the SCZ - CT group compared with HC, although the direct comparison between SCZ + CT and SCZ - CT did not show significant differences. These results suggest that childhood trauma had a subtle effect on AM and EFT impairments in schizophrenia patients.