I explored this topic in an academic research paper I wrote on childhood trauma and emotional
processing. This version has been adapted for a general audience.
Reagan Hinkle
Psychological & Brain Sciences and Sociology, UC Santa Barbara (Class of 2028)
Imagine navigating life with emotional “alarms” that activate more quickly and intensely, where
a casual conversation can feel tense or a neutral expression may seem threatening. Many
individuals who experienced significant childhood adversity report feeling unusually sensitive to
emotional situations and struggling to regulate emotions in adulthood.
Scientific research suggests that childhood maltreatment is associated with lasting differences in
neural systems involved in emotional reactivity and regulation (McCrory, Gerin, & Viding, 2017;
Teicher & Samson, 2016). Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) refer to potentially traumatic
or stressful experiences during childhood, including abuse, neglect, and forms of household
dysfunction. Greater exposure to childhood adversity has been associated with increased risk for
emotional, behavioral, and mental-health difficulties later in life.
How Childhood Trauma May Affect Emotional Processing
Emotional information can come from both social and nonsocial sources. Social-emotional cues
involve information from other people, such as facial expressions. Nonsocial emotional cues can
include emotionally significant scenes, objects, or environments that do not depend on another
person’s expression or behavior.
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Stimming Is Not Exclusive to Autism
Another important misconception is that discovering a stim means discovering evidence of autism. Humans engage in repetitive self-regulatory behaviors all the time. People bounce their legs, twirl their hair, tap pens, pace, chew their nails, shift in their seats, or repeatedly touch objects. Similar behaviors can occur in people with ADHD, anxiety, other neurodevelopmental differences, and people without any diagnosis.
Even behaviors commonly described as stims may have different functions. A bouncing leg could reflect sensory seeking, anxiety, restlessness, concentration, habit, or several of these at once. Nail biting may function differently from rocking, and repetitive hair pulling can sometimes represent a separate clinical concern rather than simply a stim. One behavior alone tells us relatively little. Patterns, context, function, and developmental history matter more.
When a “Bad Habit” Is Actually Doing Something Useful
Historically, repetitive autistic behaviors have often been approached primarily as behaviors to reduce. A more useful question is often: What purpose is this behavior serving?
Research increasingly recognizes that restricted and repetitive behaviors can have regulatory and adaptive functions for autistic people, including helping regulate sensory experiences. Stimming may help someone manage sensory input, maintain attention, regulate emotions, or express excitement. If a repetitive behavior is safe and helps someone regulate, there may be little reason to eliminate it simply because it appears unusual. Suppressing a useful behavior without understanding its purpose may remove a strategy the person was using to regulate themselves.
That does not mean every repetitive behavior should automatically be encouraged. Some behaviors can cause pain, tissue damage, injury, or significant interference with daily life. In those situations, support may involve understanding what sensory or emotional function the behavior serves and finding safer ways to meet the same need, rather than focusing exclusively on stopping the behavior.
What About Deep Pressure and Weighted Blankets?
Deep pressure has received considerable attention as a sensory-regulation strategy. Weighted blankets, compression, massage, and other forms of firm pressure are commonly discussed in both autistic communities and occupational therapy. The evidence requires some nuance. Weighted blankets provide deep-pressure stimulation, and some people report that they feel calming or comforting. Research has found potential benefits in some populations and circumstances, but the evidence is not strong enough to treat weighted blankets as a universal intervention. Studies have also produced mixed results depending on the outcome being measured.
Individual preference matters considerably. A sensory strategy that feels calming to one person may feel uncomfortable, restrictive, or overwhelming to another. For that reason, a weighted blanket should not be treated as an autism treatment, just as a particular movement should not automatically be recommended simply because someone is autistic. When sensory differences are significantly affecting daily functioning, an occupational therapist or another professional familiar with sensory processing can help identify patterns and explore appropriate strategies.
Recognizing the Body’s Attempts to Regulate
Perhaps the most useful thing about understanding proprioceptive stimming is not learning another list of autism signs, but becoming curious about behavior. Instead of assuming that pacing, rocking, squeezing, or constant movement is meaningless, consider the circumstances surrounding it. Does it appear during concentration? During stress? After prolonged social interaction? In an overwhelming sensory environment? Does the person feel calmer or more focused afterward?
For adults discovering autism later in life, this perspective can be particularly meaningful. Behaviors once described as nervous habits, restlessness, quirks, or things they needed to stop doing may have been ways their bodies tried to manage sensory and emotional demands. Not every repetitive behavior is a stim, and not every sensory preference signals autism. And not every stim needs an intervention. Sometimes the most helpful first step is simply understanding what purpose a behavior has been serving all along.
If you have spent years dismissing sensory needs, repetitive movements, or a strong preference for movement and pressure as “just habits,” exploring why those patterns occur may provide a different understanding of how you regulate.
TrueMe® Counseling provides affirming support for adults exploring autism, sensory differences, masking, stimming, and the process of seeking diagnostic clarity. You can learn more at www.truemecounseling.com.
The amygdala is involved in detecting emotionally significant information, particularly
information related to potential threat. The prefrontal cortex (PFC), meanwhile, contributes to
processes involved in interpreting and regulating emotional responses. Research on childhood
maltreatment has identified differences in several brain regions and networks involved in these
processes, although these findings represent associations rather than evidence that adversity
produces the same neurological changes in every individual (Teicher & Samson, 2016).
One theory used to understand these differences is the latent vulnerability model. This model
proposes that adaptations to an adverse early environment may be useful when an individual is
regularly exposed to threat but may contribute to greater vulnerability later, particularly when
those same responses continue in safer environments (McCrory et al., 2017). In basic terms, a
brain that has adapted to recognize potential danger quickly may continue to respond strongly to
emotional information even when an immediate threat is no longer present.
The Brain’s Response to Threat
Research reviewed by Teicher and Samson (2016) has linked childhood maltreatment with
differences in the structure and function of brain regions involved in emotion, attention, memory,
and regulation. These include regions of the prefrontal cortex and limbic structures involved in
emotional processing. One finding that appears repeatedly in the literature is altered amygdala
responsiveness to emotionally significant information, particularly emotional faces.
Amygdala hyperreactivity refers to a stronger amygdala response to emotionally important or
potentially threatening information. Researchers have proposed that heightened responsiveness
in threat-processing systems may relate to hypervigilance in some individuals who have
experienced adversity.
Hypervigilance refers to a heightened state of alertness in which a person may closely monitor
their surroundings for possible signs of danger.
Researchers also distinguish between bottom-up and top-down emotional processing.
Bottom-up processing describes rapid, automatic responses to emotional information. Top-down
regulation involves higher-level processes that help interpret, evaluate, and regulate those
responses. These systems interact rather than functioning as two completely separate parts of the
brain, and childhood adversity does not affect them in exactly the same way for every person.
Why Social Cues May Feel More Intense
Some of the strongest evidence for altered emotional processing after childhood maltreatment
comes from research involving facial expressions.
Van Harmelen and colleagues (2013) examined adults who reported childhood emotional
maltreatment and found greater amygdala responsiveness while participants processed emotional
faces. The authors suggested that heightened sensitivity to facial expressions could reflect
persistent vigilance toward socially meaningful emotional information.
This matters because facial expressions often signal another person’s mood, intentions, or
potential threat. For someone whose early environment required close attention to others’
emotions, being highly sensitive to these cues may once have been adaptive. Research does not
suggest that everyone who experiences childhood adversity will interpret neutral or emotional
faces as threatening. Instead, these findings point to group-level differences in how people
process socially relevant emotional information.
A quantitative meta-analysis by Hein and Monk (2017), which combined results across
neuroimaging studies, also found that childhood maltreatment was associated with greater
bilateral amygdala activation during threat-related processing. This provides broader evidence
that maltreatment can be associated with altered neural responses to emotionally and socially
significant information.
Emotional Regulation After Childhood Trauma
Childhood trauma may influence not only the initial detection of emotional information but also
how emotional conflict is regulated. Marusak and colleagues (2015) studied trauma-exposed children and adolescents using an emotional-conflict task. Participants categorized facial expressions while ignoring emotion words placed over the faces.
Compared with non-trauma-exposed participants, trauma-exposed youth showed differences in neural systems involved in regulating emotional conflict and greater amygdala reactivity during conflict. They were also less effective at automatically regulating competing emotional information.
This study does not demonstrate that trauma causes a universal deficit in emotion regulation. However, it provides evidence that childhood trauma exposure may be associated with differences in the automatic processing and regulation of emotionally conflicting information. Understanding this distinction is important. Heightened emotional sensitivity is not simply amatter of someone “overreacting.” Emotional responses emerge from complex interactions between previous experiences, attention, learning, brain development, current circumstances, and individual differences.
What About Nonsocial Emotional Information?
A major question is whether trauma-related emotional sensitivity is primarily domain-specific or more domain-general. Domain-specific means that the differences would be especially pronounced for certain types of information, such as facial expressions or interpersonal threats. Domain-general means that heightened sensitivity could extend across many types of emotional information, including situations that do not involve other people.
Researchers commonly use standardized emotional images to study nonsocial emotional processing. For example, Barke, Stahl, and Kröner-Herwig (2012) identified fear-evoking images from the International Affective Picture System, a widely used collection of standardized emotional photographs. However, evidence directly comparing trauma-related responses to social and nonsocial emotional cues within the same individuals is more limited.
Much of the childhood-maltreatment neuroimaging literature has focused on socially meaningful stimuli, particularly emotional faces and threat-related information. This makes it difficult to conclude that heightened emotional processing after trauma operates identically across social and nonsocial situations. Rather than assuming that trauma creates a generalized heightened response to everything emotional, this remains an important question for continued research.
Social and Nonsocial Stress
Early adversity itself can also take different forms. Some experiences are strongly interpersonal, including emotional abuse, neglect, inconsistent caregiving, or exposure to violence between people. Other stressful experiences can involve broader environmental instability, unpredictability, or unsafe surroundings. These distinctions matter because the developing brain adapts to its environment. Different forms, timing, and severity of adversity may therefore relate to different patterns of emotional processing and later vulnerability.
Research reviewed by McCrory and colleagues (2017) suggests that altered neurocognitive functioning following maltreatment can occur even when an individual does not currently have apsychiatric disorder. The latent vulnerability framework therefore focuses on increased vulnerability rather than assuming that adversity inevitably leads to mental illness.
What This Research Can Help Us Understand
Research on childhood trauma suggests that some individuals who experience significant early adversity may become especially sensitive to emotionally or socially meaningful information. In certain environments, rapidly detecting changes in another person’s expression, tone, or behavior could be protective. Later in life, however, responses shaped by threatening or unpredictable circumstances may persist even when the present environment is safer.
This perspective can offer a more complete way of understanding emotional sensitivity after trauma. Reactions that appear disproportionate in the present may sometimes reflect patterns of attention and emotional responding that developed in response to earlier experiences. At the same time, these findings do not mean that every individual who experiences childhood adversity will develop hypervigilance, emotional-regulation difficulties, or the same neural patterns. Research consistently shows substantial individual variation.
The type and timing of adversity, genetics, relationships, social support, later experiences, resilience, and many other factors can influence emotional development. Although there is considerable evidence that childhood maltreatment is associated with differences in processing socially relevant emotional and threatening information, researchers continue to investigate how broadly these differences extend across other kinds of emotional experiences.
If heightened emotional sensitivity, hypervigilance, difficulty regulating emotions, or long-standing responses connected to earlier experiences interfere with daily life, understandinghow those patterns developed can be an important part of learning to respond differently. TrueMe® Counseling provides affirming support for adults navigating anxiety, emotional regulation challenges, neurodivergence, executive-function challenges, and long-standing behavioral or emotional patterns.
Sources
Barke, A., Stahl, J., & Kröner-Herwig, B. (2012). Identifying a subset of fear-evoking pictures
from the IAPS on the basis of dimensional and categorical ratings for a German sample. Journal
of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 43(1), 565–572.
Hein, T. C., & Monk, C. S. (2017). Research review: Neural response to threat in children,
adolescents, and adults after child maltreatment—A quantitative meta-analysis. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 58(3), 222–230.
Marusak, H. A., Etkin, A., & Thomason, M. E. (2015). Childhood trauma exposure disrupts the automatic regulation of emotional processing. Neuropsychopharmacology, 40(5), 1250–1258.
McCrory, E. J., Gerin, M. I., & Viding, E. (2017). Annual research review: Childhood maltreatment, latent vulnerability and the shift to preventative psychiatry—the contribution offunctional brain imaging. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 58(4), 338–357.
Teicher, M. H., & Samson, J. A. (2016). Annual research review: Enduring neurobiological effects of childhood abuse and neglect. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 57(3),241–266.
Van Harmelen, A. L., van Tol, M. J., Demenescu, L. R., van der Wee, N. J. A., Veltman, D. J.,Aleman, A., van Buchem, M. A., Spinhoven, P., Penninx, B. W. J. H., & Elzinga, B. M. (2013). Enhanced amygdala reactivity to emotional faces in adults reporting childhood emotional maltreatment. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8(4), 362–369.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does childhood trauma affect emotional processing in adults?
Childhood trauma may be associated with differences in how the brain recognizes, interprets, and regulates emotional information. Some adults become more sensitive to facial expressions, changes in tone, or situations that seem threatening. These responses vary considerably, and not everyone who experiences childhood trauma develops emotional processing difficulties.
Can childhood trauma make you more sensitive to other people’s emotions?
Yes. Research suggests that some people who experienced childhood maltreatment show heightened sensitivity to emotional facial expressions and other social cues. If someone grew up needing to monitor a caregiver’s mood, paying close attention to subtle emotional changes may have been protective. That sensitivity can sometimes continue into adulthood, even in safer environments.
What is amygdala hyperreactivity after childhood trauma?
Amygdala hyperreactivity refers to increased activity in a brain region involved in processing emotionally significant information, particularly potential threats. Some neuroimaging studies have found greater amygdala responses among people with histories of childhood maltreatment. However, this is a research finding observed across groups, not a diagnostic test or a universal effect of trauma.
Why do some childhood trauma survivors feel threatened by neutral expressions?
For someone who grew up in an unpredictable or threatening environment, small changes in another person’s facial expression or tone may have been important warning signals. This can contribute to heightened vigilance later in life. However, research doesn’t establish that everyone with childhood trauma interprets neutral expressions as threatening, and current circumstances also influence emotional reactions.
Can therapy help with emotional sensitivity caused by childhood trauma?
Therapy may help people understand patterns of emotional sensitivity, recognize triggers, and develop ways to regulate difficult responses. Approaches may focus on emotional awareness, coping strategies, and understanding how earlier experiences influence present reactions. The most appropriate treatment depends on the individual’s symptoms, history, and needs.
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