Can Dissociation Mediate the Relationship between Emotional Dysregulation and Intelligence? An Empirical Study Involving Adolescents with and without Complex Trauma Histories

Abstract

The main aim of the study was to map the psychological functioning of individuals with adverse childhood experiences, with the objective to characterize developmental trajectories. Specifically, we investigated the relations among three of the seven domains of impairment in children and adolescents who had been exposed to complex trauma. To this end, we tested a mediation model with emotional dysregulation as the independent variable, intelligence as the dependent variable, and dissociation as the mediator. The research sample was composed of 64 participants (10–19 years old); 31 adolescents formed the clinical group and 33 the non-clinical group; for the clinical group, we recruited adolescents who were residents of therapeutic communities and had a history of complex trauma. Both groups completed the Difficulties in emotion regulation scale (DERS), Adolescent dissociative experience scale (A-DES), Trauma symptom checklist for children (TSCC), and Wechsler scales. The data analysis yielded significant results for the control group only. We suggest that healthy adolescents adopt a non-pathological dissociative cognitive style in response to increased emotional dysregulation, thus explaining their enhanced cognitive performance.