Childhood Trauma Questionnaire - Short Form (CTQ-SF)

Childhood maltreatment (CM) was quantitatively assessed with the 28-item Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) [58, 59] that was translated and adapted to Portuguese [60]. It measures childhood exposure to physical, emotional and sexual abuse and physical and emotional neglect. The instrument has five items exploring each of these five subtypes of CM, yielding 25 items for analysis and three more items to investigate minimization and denial. Participants respond to each item on a scale from 1 (“Never”) to 5 (“Always”), which indicates the frequency with which they had these experiences. Responses are converted into a maltreatment severity subtype: “None to Minimal”, “Low to Moderate”, “Moderate to Severe” or “Severe to Extreme” [58].

We used the Bernstein and Fink [58] cut-off points for “Low to Moderate” severity to classify the presence of CM (physical abuse≥8; sexual abuse ≥6; emotional abuse ≥9; physical neglect ≥8; emotional neglect ≥10) [58]. Thus, the presence of maltreatment was considered if a participant had a CTQ score equal to or higher than the low to moderate cut-off point for each maltreatment type.