Childhood trauma was assessed in both groups using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) (Bernstein and Fink, 1998; Bernstein et al., 2003). The CTQ is a 28-item self-report questionnaire that yields numerical scores for five categories of childhood trauma exposure: emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, and physical neglect. These quantitative scores are based on multiple Likert scale ratings for each type of trauma and range from 5 to 25. In addition, cut-off scores are indicated for none, low, moderate, and severe levels of trauma (Bernstein and Fink, 1998). Thus the CTQ provides both a measure of presence or absence of trauma and a measure of severity of exposure.
