In E-Risk, women completed the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) (Bernstein and Fink, 1998) when they were on average 40 years old. The CTQ inquires about five domains of childhood maltreatment: emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, and emotional and physical neglect. The validity of the CTQ has been established and scoring has been derived for each of the five domains with 0 = no maltreatment, 1 = mild maltreatment, 2 = moderate maltreatment, and 3 = severe maltreatment (Bernstein and Fink, 1998). Since our hypothesis was not specific to a particular category of maltreatment, we used the average of the five domain scores as a continuous indicator of maltreatment, comparable to earlier G×E investigations involving the CTQ (Aguilera et al., 2009). There was no association between the 5-HTTLPR and childhood maltreatment in E-Risk (χ2=0.81, p=0.37).
