Neural Bias to Social Feedback Moderates Link Between Childhood Abuse and Subsequent Harsh Parenting

Childhood abuse is often transmitted intergenerationally, leaving many families trapped in cycles of abuse. Because child abuse is transmitted through social interactions, developing effective intervention targets to disrupt these cycles may require understanding the mechanisms that support processing social feedback. This study examines whether neural biases in processing positive or negative social feedback moderate the link between history of childhood abuse and current expression of harsh parenting. Using fMRI and well-matched social and monetary feedback tasks, we studied female caregivers (N = 56; 46.16 ± 7.49 years) of adolescents. In the social feedback task, activation to negative relative to positive feedback in the anterior hippocampus, putamen, amygdala, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) moderated the link between childhood abuse and harsh parenting. Specifically, abuse severity was most strongly associated with harsh parenting among individuals with greater activation to negative relative to positive feedback. No comparable effects emerged from the monetary task. These findings suggest sensitivity to social feedback, and negative feedback in particular-may promote risk for intergenerational abuse transmission.