Specificity of childhood maltreatment and emotion deficit in nonsuicidal self-injury in an inpatient sample of youth

• Study examined abuse subtypes and specific emotion skills in youth NSSI.
• Abuse subtypes, when examined in tandem, were not directly associated with NSSI.
• Sexual abuse was not associated with emotion expressiveness and coping.
• Emotion coping did not mediate link between physical/emotional abuse and NSSI.
• Emotion expressiveness mediated link between emotional abuse and NSSI.

The present study investigated the function of two specific emotion-related skills, emotion expressivity and emotion coping, as potential mediators in the relations between childhood sexual, physical, and emotional abuse and NSSI. A robust body of work supports the role of emotion regulation in nonsuicidal self-injury, but additional research is warranted to tease apart the role of specific emotion regulation deficits as predictors of NSSI. Participants included 95 youth (Mage=14.22, SDage=1.67; 58% female) hospitalized on one of two acute care psychiatric inpatient units. Participants completed self-report questionnaires related to childhood experiences of trauma, current emotion expressivity and coping, and lifetime frequency of NSSI. Path analytic models indicated that only child emotional abuse was directly associated with NSSI when all abuse subtypes were examined simultaneously. Results also indicated that poor emotion expressivity, but not emotion coping, mediated the relation between childhood experiences of emotional abuse and NSSI.