Experience of maltreatment blunts the calibration of control beliefs

Experience of maltreatment in childhood profoundly impacts a plethora of neurocognitive systems, significantly increasing risk for later mental health problems. Here we investigate how childhood maltreatment shapes control beliefs and their relationship with stress and exploration in adulthood. We used a recently developed task, the Wheel Stopping (WS) task, to measure and manipulate control beliefs and stress, and combined this with a novel self-report measure of exploration in a sample of 477 adults with and without experience of childhood maltreatment (matched on age, gender and socioeconomic status). The WS task utilises two between-subjects manipulations of control: task controllability (high vs low), and performance feedback (relative positive vs relative negative). We show that despite similar task performance, maltreated participants displayed lower levels of control beliefs compared to controls and that while task performance improved over time for both groups, maltreated participants used this less to update their control beliefs. Further, whereas both groups responded equally to the task manipulations, only controls leveraged relative positive feedback to reduce task-related stress and increase goal-directed exploration. We conclude that maltreatment blunts the calibration of control beliefs, informing both stress and goal-directed exploration, likely increasing vulnerability to psychopathology.