Childhood trauma is known to increase the risk of depression, possibly by making people more sensitive to stress. In this study, Caroline Broeder and Jasmin Pasteuning investigated how adults with both depression and childhood trauma respond to stress, and whether their reactions are different from those of people without mental disorders or childhood trauma.

All participants were asked to complete the same stressful public speaking task. They reported their feelings of tension and negative emotions, while we used MRI scans to study changes in brain activity directly (15 minutes) and later (135 minutes) following stress.

Brain activity vs. emotional reactions
These results showed that the stress task caused increased tension and negative emotions in all participants. However, people with depression and childhood trauma reported feeling more tense than those without these conditions. Interestingly, we didn’t find any changes in brain activity following stress over time, and there were no significant differences between the groups in how their brains responded to stress.

These findings suggest that while stress affects how people feel, the brain’s response to stress might not differ between those with depression and childhood trauma and others. The impact of stress seems to be more noticeable in people’s emotional reactions than in brain activity. This highlights the need to study childhood trauma using a variety of methods, including emotional and physical measures, instead of focusing solely on brain activity.