Socio-emotional processing in mothers with and without interpersonal violence related post traumatic stress disorder

This thesis is primarily occupied with two questions: 1) How does general socio-emotional processing relate to parenting specific socio-emotional processing? 2) How does maternal post traumatic stress disorder due to interpersonal violence (IPV-PTSD) relate to socio-emotional processing, both in and outside the parenting context? This thesis combines 4 studies, which all used magnetic resonance imaging to measure the brain activity of mothers of young children (12-42 months of age). All studies include a subgroup of women with IPV-PTSD. Mothers watched emotional video scenes of both child and adult interaction. The measured brain activity was then associated to measures outside the scanner, such as maternal sensitivity, IPV-PTSD symptom severity or psychological dissociation. Results suggest that emotion information processing strategies in general emotion processing are predictive of parenting specific processing. It seems that it is particularly the socio-emotional processing strategies, at which mothers with IPV-PTSD are impaired compared to non-PTSD controls