Grant: Project Grant

Child maltreatment (CM) refers to any act of commission or omission by a parent or other caregiver that results in intended or unintended harm such as physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, or neglect. One out of three adults have experienced CM in Canada. It is estimated to account for around a quarter of all mental disorders in adulthood and to cost more than 100 billion dollars each year. Despite these dramatic consequences, little has been done to better understand how CM can keep hindering mental health in adulthood, decades after the abuse. While memories for trauma (e.g., car accident) have been more investigated, CM memories have received much less attention. In addition, existing treatments for distressing memories in general have typically focused on increasing the processing of the distressing memory, but not on facilitating its integration into broader memory structure. Our past work shows that such integration of negative memories is key to mental health and prevents the negative memories to continuously hinder mental health over time. For the first time in memory or child maltreatment research, we seek to determine whether the level of integration in the memory system of accessible memories of past maltreatment could explain the association between CM and mental health in adulthood. We will follow adult CM victims and a control matched sample during three years. We will investigate whether increases or decreases of symptoms over time can be predicted by a weaker or greater integration of CM memories in the memory system, respectively. The present large-scale study is likely to lead to better prevention programs to victims of CM by devoting more attention to the cognitive organization of their CM memories, and to adaptation of existing treatments that could specifically target CM memories and their cognitive organization. Altogether, the expected findings should considerably contribute to reduce the dramatic economic cost of CM in the society.