Social threat and safety learning in individuals with adverse childhood experiences: electrocortical evidence on face processing, recognition, and working memory

BACKGROUND: Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are often associated with stress and anxiety-related disorders in adulthood, and learning and memory deficits have been suggested as a potential link between ACEs and psychopathology. OBJECTIVE: In this preregistered study, the impact of social threat learning on the processing, encoding, and recognition of unknown faces as well as their contextual settings was measured by recognition performance and event-related brain potentials. METHOD: Sixty-four individuals with ACEs encoded neutral faces within threatening or safe context conditions. During recognition, participants had to decide whether a face was new or had been previously presented in what context (item-source memory), looking at old and new faces. For visual working memory, participants had to detect changes in low and high load conditions during contextual threat or safety. RESULTS: Results showed a successful induction of threat expectation in persons with ACEs. In terms of face and source recognition, overall recognition of safe and new faces was better compared to threatening face-compounds, with more socially anxious individuals having an advantage in remembering threatening faces. For working memory, an effect of task load was found on performance, irrespective of threat or safety context. Regarding electrocortical activity, an old/new recognition effect and threat-selective processing of face–context information was observed during both encoding and recognition. Moreover, neural activity associated with change detection was found for faces in a threatening context, but only at high task load, suggesting reduced capacity for faces in potentially harmful situations when cognitive resources are limited. CONCLUSION: While individuals with ACE showed intact social threat and safety learning overall, threat-selective face processing was observed for item/source memory, and a threatening context required more processing resources for visual working memory. Further research is needed to investigate the psychophysiological processes involved in functional and dysfunctional memory systems and their importance as vulnerability factors for stress-related disorders.