ABSTRACT
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.