The Role of Childhood Maltreatment in The Relationship Between Social Anxiety and Dissociation: A Novel Link

ABSTRACT

Children that have been maltreated may experience manifold negative effects later in life. Two such sequelae are social anxiety and dissociation. Recent studies have noted their frequent co-occurrence, but no hypothesis has yet been offered explaining how they interact. College undergraduates (N = 198) completed the Child Trauma Questionnaire, Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale, and Cambridge Depersonalization Scale. Social anxiety significantly predicted severity of dissociation, and self-reported childhood maltreatment (CM) significantly predicted both social anxiety and dissociation. Notably, emotional abuse was the only significant subtype of CM to predict social anxiety. Furthermore, CM moderated the relationship between social anxiety and dissociation, such that the presence of CM strengthened the predictive effect of social anxiety on dissociation. This study was the first to implicate CM as a mechanism in the social anxiety-dissociation relationship. This study was also the first to note a social anxiety-dissociation link in a non-clinical sample, thus demonstrating the existence of this relationship along a continuum of severity – not solely for those with extreme disturbances.

KEYWORDS:

• Anxiety
• anxiety disorders
• childhood abuse
• dissociation
• emotional abuse
• emotion regulation

Conflict of interest

The authors report no conflict of interest

Notes

1. Due to an error in data collection, item number 18 was not included in analyses.

2. Although Age became significant at p < .05 in Block 2, its 95% confidence interval included 0, thus making it an unstable predictor.