Effect of emotion regulation and identity development of childhood trauma and their relationship with psychopathology

Child neglect and abuse are defined in different ways in various subjects, however in general, children under 18 years of age, physical, emotional, mental and social development of all types of damaging and distorting health behavior are considered as abuse and neglect. The present study aims to investigate, strenght and direction of the association of childhood trauma with difficulty of emotion regulation, identity confusion and psychopathology. In this study, participants were Adnan Menderes University students. In the first stage 635 students filled the questionnairre. The individuals whose scores of CTQ (n=69) were greater than the average were included in the second stage (who were accessible and accepted to participate in second stage). %66,7 of them were women (n=46) and %33,3 of them were men (n=23), overall mean age was 20,93 (17-29 years). Questionnairres consisted of Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ), Difficulties of Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS), Sense of Identity Assessment Form (SIAF), SCID-I and SCID-II. In order to asses the predictive power of independent variables on the dependent variable, series of simple linear and multiple regression analyzes were employed. The results revealed that emotional neglect and emotional abuse were more prevalent than sexual, physical abuse, physical neglect participants who have higher income, addicted to use drug, have personal or family-harming behaviors or suicide attempts compared the others, had DERS scores were higher significantly. Emotional abuse and sexual abuse was found to have significant effects on DERS and emotional abuse and emotional neglect was found to have significant effects on SIAF. In addition, particularly in the relation between emotional abuse and identity confusion the difficulty in emotion regulation were found to be a partial mediator variable. Finally, comparing the participants who met and not met the diagnosis, the scores of the in the first group were significantly higher than the scores of the second group participants however their CTQ and DERS scores were not statistically significantly differed.