RESEARCH ARTICLE The ‘Maltreatment and Abuse Chronology of Exposure ’ (MACE) Scale for the Retrospective Assessment of Abuse and Neglect During Development

There is increasing interest in childhood maltreatment as a potent stimulus that may alter trajectories of brain development, induce epigenetic modifications and enhance risk for medical and psychiatric disorders. Although a number of useful scales exist for retrospec-tive assessment of abuse and neglect they have significant limitations. Moreover, they fail to provide detailed information on timing of exposure, which is critical for delineation of sen-sitive periods. The Maltreatment and Abuse Chronology of Exposure (MACE) scale was de-veloped in a sample of 1051 participants using item response theory to gauge severity of exposure to ten types of maltreatment (emotional neglect, non-verbal emotional abuse, pa-rental physical maltreatment, parental verbal abuse, peer emotional abuse, peer physical bullying, physical neglect, sexual abuse, witnessing interparental violence and witnessing violence to siblings) during each year of childhood. Items included in the subscales had ac-ceptable psychometric properties based on infit and outfit mean square statistics, and each subscale passed Andersen’s Likelihood ratio test. The MACE provides an overall severity score and multiplicity score (number of types of maltreatment experienced) with excellen