RESEARCH ARTICLE Childhood Trauma and Personal Mastery: Their Influence on Emotional Reactivity to Everyday Events in a Community Sample of Middle-Aged Adults

Childhood trauma is associated with premature declines in health in midlife and old age. Pathways that have been implicated, but less studied include social-emotional regulation, biological programming, and habitual patterns of thought and action. In this study we fo-cused on childhood trauma’s influence via alterations in social-emotional regulation to ev-eryday life events, a pathway that has been linked to subsequent health effects. Data from a 30-day daily diary of community residents who participated in a study of resilience in Midlife (n = 191,Mage = 54, SD = 7.50, 54 % women) was used to examine whether self-reports of childhood trauma were associated with daily well-being, as well as reported and emotional reactivity to daily negative and positive events. Childhood trauma reports were associated with reporting lower overall levels of and greater variability in daily well-being. Childhood trauma was linked to greater reports of daily negative events, but not to positive events. Fo-cusing on emotional reactivity to daily events, residents who reported higher levels of child-hood trauma showed stronger decreases in well-being when experiencing negative events and also stronger increases in well-being with positive events. For those reporting childhoo