Childhood Emotional Abuse and Adult Mental Health: Does Whom You Interact With Matter?

Considerable research demonstrates that childhood emotional abuse exerts long‐term, deleterious effects on adult mental health. The purpose of the current study is to extend this body of work by examining how having social ties to higher or lower‐status others moderates the association between childhood emotional abuse and depression in adulthood. This study employed multivariate regression analyses using data from the 2012 Korean General Social Survey ( n  = 1388). The analyses showed that childhood emotional abuse was positively associated with depression (b = 0.82; p  < 0.001). Yet, socializing with lower‐status others buffered the positive association of childhood emotional abuse with depression (b = −0.75; p  < 0.05). By contrast, socializing with higher‐status others failed to moderate the association (b = −0.20; p  > 0.10). This study elaborates on the stress process theory by identifying a personal resource that has been understudied in the literature—socializing with lower‐status others. The results suggest that interacting with lower‐status contacts may act as a countervailing mechanism that mitigates the detrimental association between childhood emotional abuse and adult mental health.