Objective: Cognitive development is susceptible to environmental distress, leading to cognitive distortions. Cognitive distortions may affect clinical course of psychiatric disorders. We aimed to assess whether childhood maltreatment and emotion dysregulation impair automatic thoughts (ATs) and meta-cognitions (MCs) in Bipolar Disorder (BD) and Major Depressive Disorder - Recurrent (MDB-RE) in this study.
Method: 85 patients with BD, 81 MDD-RE in remission and 86 healthy participants were enrolled. Automatic Thoughts Scale (ATS), Metacognition Questionnaire (MCQ-30), Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ- 28), Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Strategies Scale (DERS) were the measures used.
Results: ATs were determined by CTQ physical abuse (β=0.34, p<0.01), DERS goals (β=-0.37, p<0.01), impulse (β=0.53, p<0.01) and non-accept (β=0.23, p<0.05) subscales in BD (F=21.08, p<0.01) and CTQ emotional neglect (β=0.22, p<0.05), DERS strategies (β=0.39, p<0.05) in MDD-RE (F=9.97, p<0.05). MCs were predicted by sexual abuse (β=0.46, p<0.01) in BD (F=4.88, p<0.01), and emotional abuse (B=-0.30, p<0.05) in MDD-RE (F= 7.02, p<0.01).
Conclusion: These results suggest that emotion dysregulation and childhood adversities are associated with cognitive processes such as MCs and ATs in MDD-RE and BD. Cognitive processes can cause various clinical manifestations and emotion dysregulation and childhood traumas should be considered as psychopathological components that can affect the course of mood disorders via various components. Further follow-up studies and larger samples are needed to better understand the effects of these components.