A standardized naturalistic audio stimulus dataset with unsupervised labeling.

Research has shown that experiences of childhood abuse and neglect have persistent negative effects on physical and mental health. Different forms of childhood abuse (e.g., physical, emotional, and sexual) and neglect (physical, and emotional) may have different effects on the type and severity of psychopathological symptoms in adulthood. Repeated or prolonged experiences of violence and maltreatment by caregivers could lead to an increased sensitivity to threat-related stimuli. The dot-probe task has been frequently administered in research on childhood adversity to assess attention biases. Studies on types of childhood maltreatment and negative attentional biases based on the dot-probe procedure have produced inconsistent results. In a sample of maltreated children, physical maltreatment but not neglect was related to an attentional bias away from angry faces. Kelly et al. observed also an attentional bias away from angry faces in maltreated children, but these children were primarily characterized by neglect and emotional abuse. Günther et al. found a positive association of physical neglect and emotional abuse with an attentional bias towards sad faces in depressed patients. Blauth and Iffland reported associations of emotional abuse with increased attention to angry faces and associations of emotional neglect with attentional avoidance of angry faces in a community sample of adults. Hori et al. did not reveal relations between subtypes of childhood maltreatment and attentional biases either toward or away from negative words in healthy women. These mixed results could be due to differences in experimental stimuli and procedures and study participants’ biological sex, age, and psychopathological status. Another factor that could explain the inconsistent findings is the low reliability of the dot-probe task. Poor reliability of attention bias indices (reaction time- and accuracy-based scores) was observed for different versions of the dot-probe task. Reliable measures of attention are necessary to advance our understanding of the attention processes that might be involved in childhood trauma and psychopathology. Compared to reaction-time tasks such as the dot probe task, eye-tracking systems allow a direct and continuous measurement of visual attention. For free viewing tasks, indices of attentional bias based on fixation duration show adequate to good reliability. Only a few eye-tracking studies have investigated the relationship between childhood maltreatment experiences and attention to emotions in adulthood. Bodenschatz et al. observed that overall severity of childhood maltreatment exposure was linked to an avoidance of angry and sad facial expressions during free viewing in a mixed-sex sample of depressed patients. Similarly, in a sample of healthy women, Hoepfel et al. found evidence of an association between severity of adverse childhood experiences and attentional avoidance of disgusted facial expressions at a late stage of perception. In a recent investigation focusing on the subtypes of childhood maltreatment, high levels of physical and emotional abuse went along with decreased attention to positive facial expressions, and, in addition, severe levels of emotional abuse were related to less attention to disgusted faces. The latter findings suggest that attention to social emotional information in adulthood might depend on the type and severity of childhood trauma in women.