Interaction Between Age of First Interpersonal Violence Exposure on Emotion Processing and Neural Network Activation

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Paige Broski¹, Luna Malloy¹, Hamza Suhail¹, Ali Arain¹, Elizabeth A. Bauer¹, John Leri¹, Josh Cisler¹; ¹University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School

Previous research demonstrates that trauma exposure alters neurocircuitry patterns in response to emotional faces, with differences observed between adolescents and adults. We hypothesized that the age of first Interpersonal Violence (IPV) exposure would predict heightened neural activity to fearful faces in the salience network. Participants aged 21-50 (N =134) completed a facial emotion processing task while undergoing an fMRI scan. They were presented with faces varying in duration (overt/500ms, covert/33ms) and valence (fearful, neutral). Support vector machine (SVM) classifiers, combined with a leave-one-out approach, were used to build models that differentiated fearful faces from neutral faces based on the salience network. These models provided individualized fear predictions (IFP) for the left-out subject’s data. Linear mixed-effects models were then used to test the effects and interactions between age at first IPV exposure, valence, and duration on IFP. Within the salience network, an interaction between duration and age of first IPV exposure, t(4892)=2.67, p=.008, demonstrated that individuals who experience their first IPV exposure at or after age 16 exhibit greater IFP. Specifically, individuals who experienced their first IPV at or after age 16 show a significantly increased IFP for overt faces, regardless of valence, compared to those with no IPV or IPV before 16, t(2448)=2.41, p=.016. These findings suggest that IPV exposure at or after age 16 influences fear processing in the brain, with heightened fear responses linked to this timing. These results also highlight a broader nuance of developmental timing of trauma exposure on subsequent neurocircuitry changes.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotional responding