Child maltreatment (CM) is the most important preventable risk factor for psychopathology and there is a pressing need to understand how CM gets 'under the skin' to markedly increase risk in some individuals as well as a comparable effort to identify factors associated with better than expected outcomes in other individuals. This special issue of Child Maltreatment provides a series of sophisticated studies on the neurobiological impact of CM, of which we have chosen 4 articles to comment on.The articles by Oshri et al., and Peveril, Sheridan, Busso & McLaughlin are amygdala centric and provide important new information on the impact of CM on the morphology and functional connectivity of this highly stress susceptible structure. The article by Demers et al., presents data from a longitudinal study that illustrates the potentially disruptive effects of CM on the association between maternal relationship quality, frontal cortical development and symptomatology. Finally, the De Bellis et al., study addresses the pressing question, which we have labeled the 'ecophenotype hypothesis', that postulates that maltreated and non-maltreated individuals with the same primary DSM diagnosis are clinically and neurobiologically distinct, and provides new evidence for a specific prefrontal cortical neurobiological abnormality in the maltreated subtype.
Keywords: adverse childhood experiences; child maltreatment; cognitive development; resilience.