Background: Exposure to adverse experiences is a well-established major risk factor for affective psychopathology. The vulnerability of deleterious sequelae is assumed in maladaptive processes of the defensive system, particularly in emotional processing. More specifically, childhood maltreatment has been suggested to be associated with the recruitment of specific and distinct defensive response profiles. To date it remains unclear whether these are specific or generalisable to recent adversity in adulthood. Method: This preregistered study aimed to investigate the impact of exposure to childhood and recent adversity on emotional processing in 685 healthy adults with the “Affective Startle Modulation” Paradigm (ASM). Results: First, we replicated higher trait anxiety and depression levels in individuals exposed to both types of adversity. Second, we observed blunted general skin conductance reactivity in individuals exposed to recent adversity. Third, individuals exposed to childhood maltreatment showed reduced, while individuals exposed to recent adversity showed increased discrimination between pictures of negative and neutral valence, compared to non-exposed individuals in SCR. No association between exposure to adversity and fear potentiated startle was observed. Furthermore, explorative analyses revealed moderate dimensional and categorical agreement between two childhood maltreatment questionnaires and provide insight into potential adversity-type specific effects. Conclusion: Our results support experience-dependent plasticity in sympathetic nervous system reactivity and suggest distinct response profiles in affective modulation in individuals exposed to early versus recent adversity. We emphasise the need to further explore distinct adversity profiles to further our understanding on specific psychophysiological profiles and their potential implication for prevention and intervention.

Hypotheses and analyses were pre-registered (OSF; https://osf.io/8kmgw; December-12-2019). The zip-folder contains the data, code, text, figures and tables necessary to create the manuscript with the title as indicated above which can be found as preprint here https://psyarxiv.com/wjeyg [doi: 10.31234/osf.io/wjeyg]. Please download the zip-folder and follow the instructions of the ReadMe-file to render the manuscript. This work was supported by grants awarded by the German Research foundation to TBL (DFG LO1980/4-1) as well as by a grant awarded by the German Research Foundation in the context of the Transregional Collaborative Research Center CRC 58 with projects Z02 (INST 211/438-4) and B07 (INST 211/633-2 and INST 211/633-1). NOTE FOR SECONDARY DATA USERS: When aiming re-use the data provided here, we advice you to get in contact with the authors as we are still working on the dataset (e.g., on associations between anxiety, depression and startle/SCR responding during the ASM task.