The Childhood Trauma Questionnaire was used to quantify lifetime exposure to maltreatment in five categories: emotional, physical, and sexual abuse and emotional and physical neglect (29). Each of the instrument’s subscales has robust internal consistency and excellent convergent validity with a clinician-rated interview of childhood abuse and therapists’ ratings of abuse (30). We focused on the emotional neglect subscale because previous research has associated severe forms of emotional neglect with heightened amygdala reactivity (4, 6). Moreover, there was a substantial amount of variability on this subscale relative to the other subscales in the community sample studied here. The Tanner scale was used to assess pubertal status (31, 32).
