Ricerc@Sapienza

Background. "Complex trauma" describes the occurrence of multiple, chronic, and prolonged adverse events (most often of an interpersonal nature and early-life onset), that occur within the child's caregiving system. Early interpersonal traumatization exerts a deleterious impact on children's abilities to recognize, express, and regulate emotional states. A large amount of studies has provided evidence of the cerebral changes associated with traumatic symptom reduction and emotion regulation improvement in children, after Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). On the contrary, the impact of psychodynamic therapy (PDT) on neural processing of emotions in children with complex trauma has yet to be explored.
Objective. The aim of the present study is to evaluate the effects of brief PDT on neural responses to adults' facial emotions, in children with histories of early and prolonged maltreatment.
Methodology. Ten school-aged children will be examined before and within one month after the conclusion of brief PDT. high-density Electroencephalography (hd-EEG) will be recorded while children passively viewing angry, afraid, happy, and neutral faces. Clinical scales, assessing children's trauma-related symptoms and behavioral/emotional problems, will be administered at the same time. Correlation analyses will be performed to detect a link between children's neural responses to adults' facial emotions and children's scores on clinical scales.
Expected Results. After brief PDT, traumatized children will show increased activity in areas implicated in high-order cognitive processing and in facial emotion recognition. These changes will be associated with the decrease of trauma-related symptoms and the improvement of behavioral/emotional functioning in children.