Association of adversity with psychopathology in early childhood: Dimensional and cumulative approaches.

BACKGROUND: The association between adversity and psychopathology in adolescents and adults is characterized by equifinality. These associations, however, have not been assessed during early childhood when psychopathology first emerges. Defining adversity using both dimensional and cumulative risk approaches, we examined whether specific types of adversity are differentially associated with psychopathology in preschool-aged children. METHODS: Measures of threat, deprivation, and total adversities (i.e., cumulative risk) were calculated based on parent-reported information for 755 2- to 5-year old children recruited from pediatric primary care clinics. Logistic regression was used to estimate cross-sectional associations between type of adversity and anxiety, depression, ADHD, and behavioral disorder diagnoses. RESULTS: Threat and cumulative risk exhibited independent associations with psychopathology. Threat was strongly related to behavioral disorders. Cumulative risk was consistently related to all psychopathologies. CONCLUSIONS: Using mutually adjusted models, we identified differential associations between threat and psychopathology outcomes in preschool-aged children. This selectivity may reflect different pathways through which adversity increases the risk for psychopathology during this developmentally important period. As has been observed at other ages, a cumulative risk approach also effectively identified the cumulative impact of all forms of adversity on most forms of psychopathology during early childhood.

Emotion Reactivity and Regulation in Adolescent Girls Following an Interpersonal Rejection.

Failures in emotion regulation, especially as a result of interpersonal stress, are implicated as transdiagnostic risk factors for psychopathology. This study examines the effects of an experimentally timed targeted interpersonal rejection on emotion reactivity and regulation in typically developing adolescent girls. Girls ( n = 33, ages 9-16 years, M = 12.47, SD = 2.20) underwent fMRI involving a widely used emotion regulation task. The emotion task involves looking at negative stimuli and using cognitive reappraisal strategies to decrease reactions to negative stimuli. Participants also engaged in a social evaluation task, which leads participants to believe a preselected peer was watching and evaluating the participant. We subsequently told participants they were rejected by this peer and examined emotion reactivity and regulation before and after this rejection. Adolescent girls evidence greater reactivity via higher self-reported emotional intensity and greater amygdala activation to negative stimuli immediately after (compared with before) the rejection. Self-reported emotional intensity differences before and after rejection were not observed during regulation trials. However, on regulation trials, girls exhibited increased prefrontal activation in areas supporting emotion regulation after compared with before the rejection. This study provides evidence that a targeted rejection increases self-report and neural markers of emotion reactivity and that girls increase prefrontal activation to regulate emotions after a targeted rejection.

Psychosocial deprivation and receptive language ability: a two-sample study.

BACKGROUND: The quality of early caregiving experiences is a known contributor to the quality of the language experiences young children receive. What is unknown is whether, and if so, how psychosocial deprivation early in life is associated with long-lasting receptive language outcomes. METHODS: Two prospective longitudinal studies examining early psychosocial deprivation/neglect in different contexts (i.e., deprivation due to institutional care or deprivation experienced by children residing within US families) and receptive language as assessed via the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) were used to assess the magnitude of these associations. First, 129 participants from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a randomized controlled trial of foster care as an alternative to institutional care in Romania, completed a receptive language assessment at age 18 years. Second, from the USA, 3342 participants from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study were assessed from infancy until middle childhood. RESULTS: Children exposed to early institutional care, on average, had lower receptive language scores than their never institutionalized counterparts in late adolescence. While randomization to an early foster care intervention had no long-lasting association with PPVT scores, the duration of childhood exposure to institutional care was negatively associated with receptive language. Psychosocial deprivation in US families was also negatively associated with receptive language longitudinally, and this association remained statistically significant even after accounting for measures of socioeconomic status. CONCLUSION: Experiences of psychosocial deprivation may have long-lasting consequences for receptive language ability, extending to age 18 years. Psychosocial deprivation is an important prospective predictor of poorer receptive language. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Bucharest Early Intervention Project ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT00747396.