2026-10-14T15:36:18Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/33892252 2026-09-22T07:13:42Z category_30322 category_30358 category_30379 category_30373 portal_549 item_type_3 month_year_09_2026

DATASET: Experience of maltreatment is associated with a blunted calibration of control beliefs Daniel McGlade (7436081) Jennifer Fielder (11489467) Quentin J. M. Huys (7865567) Eamon McCrory (6779033) Nikolaus Steinbeis (6782459) Applied and developmental psychology not elsewhere classified Clinical psychology Learning, motivation and emotion Cognition Childhood maltreatment Early life adversity (ELA) complex traumatic experiences Agency Learned helplessness Control Exploration Stress <p dir="ltr">Here we investigate how childhood maltreatment shapes control beliefs and their relationship with stress and exploration in adulthood using a sample of 477 adults with and without experience of childhood maltreatment matched on age, gender and socioeconomic status. 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. 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 improvements in objective task performance, maltreated participants increased their control beliefs less over time (semi-partial R² = 0.0004). Further, whereas both groups responded equally to the task manipulations, only control participants leveraged relative positive feedback to reduce task-related stress (semi-partial R² = 0.009) and increase goal-directed exploration (semi-partial R² = 0.0015). We conclude that maltreatment is associated with a blunted calibration of control beliefs, informing both stress and goal-directed exploration, in turn likely increasing vulnerability to psychopathology.</p><p><br></p><p dir="ltr">We refer the reader to the current preprint of our manuscript:</p><p dir="ltr">McGlade, D., Fielder, J., Huys, Q., McCrory, E., & Steinbeis, N. (2025). Experience of maltreatment blunts the calibration of control beliefs.</p> 2026-09-22T07:13:42Z Dataset Dataset 10.5522/04/33892252.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/DATASET_Experience_of_maltreatment_is_associated_with_a_blunted_calibration_of_control_beliefs/33892252 CC0