# Paternal adverse childhood experiences and offspring’s attentional disengagement from faces at 8 months—Results from the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study

## TL;DR

This study explores how a father's childhood trauma may affect his child's attention to faces at 8 months old.

## Contribution

It is the first to link paternal adverse childhood experiences to offspring's attentional bias for emotional faces.

## Key findings

- Paternal sexual abuse was negatively associated with children's face bias.
- Daughters of sexually abused fathers showed lower face bias and higher fear bias.
- The effect sizes were small and require further confirmation in larger samples.

## Abstract

Paternal adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been recently linked to offspring’s brain development. Yet, none of the previous studies in humans have explored the association between paternal ACEs and a child’s attentional bias for facial expressions of emotion. Our study fills this gap. Data were collected from 239 fathers (mean age 32.15; SD 5.04) and their children at 8 months of age who were part of the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study. Paternal ACEs were evaluated using the Trauma and Distress Scale (TADS) in five domains: emotional and physical neglect, emotional and physical abuse, and sexual abuse. In children, eye-tracking was used to study attentional engagement to emotional faces vs. non-faces and distractors, and to calculate face and fear bias indices. Hierarchical linear regression and the Mann-Whitney U test were used for analyses. A negative association between paternal sexual abuse and face bias was found in children (p = 0.043), when paternal postpartum anxiety and sex of the child were controlled, however the effect size was rather low. Additionally, daughters (n = 6) of sexually abused fathers expressed lower face bias (p = 0.02) and higher fear bias (p = 0.04) than daughters of sexually non-abused fathers. Our preliminary exploration suggests a potential intergenerational effect of paternal exposure to sexual abuse on the processing of facial expression among daughters at the age of 8 months, yet the results require further confirmatory analyses, especially in a larger study group of ACEs-exposed individuals.