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This research was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (to L.S.); a Vanier doctoral scholarship from NSERC under the direction of Louis Schmidt (to V.M.); and a New Investigator Award from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, a Faculty Scholar Award from the William T. Grant Foundation, and the Wyeth Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Clinical Research Chair in Women's Mental Health (to H.M). Further support was provided by the CIHR Institutes of Gender and Health; Aging; Human Development, Child and Youth Health; Neurosciences; Mental Health and Addiction; and Population and Public Health and the Johnson Foundation. We thank the participants for their cooperation and Lindsay Bennett, Sylvia Nowakowski, Caroline Parkin, Diane Santesso, Masako Tanaka, and Emily Vella for their help with data collection and data entry. We are also grateful to the research assistants and nurses who assisted with this project as well as the comments of Karen Mathewson and three anonymous reviewers.
The five major types of child maltreatment (physical, sexual, emotional abuse, neglect, and exposure to intimate partner violence) are examples of adverse early life events associated with a substantial increase in vulnerability for physical health problems (Danese, Pariante, Caspi, Taylor, & Poulton, 2007; Felitti et al., 1998) and general psychiatric impairments (Kessler et al., 1994; MacMillan et al., 2001; Mullen, Martin, Romans, & Herbison, 1996; Neumann, Houskamp, Pollack, & Briere, 1996). Functionally, the experience of child maltreatment has been linked to multiple negative outcomes, including threat hypervigilance, depression, impaired self-regulation, impulsivity, substance abuse, emotional instability, interpersonal violence, antisocial tendencies, and borderline personality disorder (Felitti et al., 1998; Johnson, Cohen, Brown, Smailes, & Bernstein, 1999; Lewis, 1992; Pollak, Cicchetti, Klorman, & Brumaghim, 1997; Rogosch & Cicchetti, 2004, 2005; van der Kolk, 2003; van der Kolk & Fisler, 1994; Widom, 1989).
More recently, the field has moved toward embracing measures that can enhance our knowledge of how early adverse experiences affect brain structure and function (e.g., Curtis & Cicchetti, 2007). This shift is important, because it is understood that experience alters complex behavioral outcomes via its impact on more fundamental brain systems (Knudsen, 2004). One hope is that the addition of...