One Character Trait May Be More Common in Adults Who Faced Childhood Trauma
Newsweek · C · trust 55/100
0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. Adults who experienced trauma in childhood may be more likely to feel apathetic later in life, according to new research that links the condition to changes in a part of the brain best known for its role in memory.
"I have been seeing this in my practice for years and the new research supports it," Matthew Leahy, a licensed clinical psychologist who was not involved in the study, told Newsweek .
He said the findings help reframe what apathy can look like in people who have lived through trauma, facing it at a young age.
"What can look from the outside like laziness, disengagement or a lack of effort may actually involve changes in how strongly someone anticipates or responds to reward," the psychologist said.
The study , led by researchers from Temple University and the University of Oregon, found that childhood trauma is associated with apathy and a reduced ability to feel pleasure, a condition commonly known as anhedonia.
The Cleveland Clinic describes the condition as being the "inability to experience joy or pleasure," linking it to feeling numb, uninterested in prior hobbies.
"It’s a common symptom of many mental health conditions such as depression," the academic medical center writes.
The effect was strongest in people whose brain scans showed disrupted activity in the hippocampus, a region of the brain that is more commonly associated with memory than motivation.
Researchers surveyed 92 people—37 men and 55 women—about their childhood experiences and how much pleasure they get from positive events in their daily lives in adulthood.
The group was deliberately chosen to include a higher-than-average number of people prone to anhedonia, though the sample size is rather small compared with other peer-reviewed studies.
Participants then underwent functional MRI brain scans: an imaging technique that tracks brain activity by following changes in blood flow.
The researchers focused on the hippocampus and its connections to other brain areas involved in reward and motivation, including the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens.
They measured resting connections between these regions, as well as how the hippocampus responded to new experiences during tasks.
Participants who reported experiencing childhood trauma were generally more likely to report apathy.
However, the strongest effects showed up in trauma survivors whose scans revealed weaker connections between the hippocampus and reward-related brain areas. In this group, reduced hippocampal activity and weaker signaling to the reward system were linked to greater anticipatory anhedonia— difficulty looking forward to or anticipating something enjoyable .
Study co-author Vishnu Murty, of the University of Oregon, said the work is "among the first" to connect the hippocampus to apathetic behavior in humans, rather than just storing and sorting memories.
The research team said it now hopes to identify a specific target within the hippocampus that could help restore people's ability to feel pleasure after childhood trauma .
Leahy said the findings broaden the conversation around trauma, which has traditionally centered on fear and anxiety .
"We've thought a great deal about trauma in terms of the brain's threat systems," he said. "This research adds to the picture by showing that trauma may also affect the systems involved in motivation and the expectation, that something positive will feel rewarding."
He added that unresolved trauma "does not go away," even when someone cannot draw a direct line between their past and their present behavior.
"It stays in the back of the mind and influences how we view and interact with the world," he said.
Still, Leahy cautioned against reading too much into the results. The study involved fewer than 100 participants, he flagged, and the findings show an association, not proof that trauma permanently alters the human brain.
"Having childhood trauma does not mean someone is destined to develop apathy or anhedonia," he said. "What it does give us is another potential pathway for understanding why people respond so differently to early adversity—and, eventually, potentially another target for treatment."
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