Identifying cognitive, affective, and developmental mechanisms linking threat and deprivation with adolescent psychopathology

Ekaterina Sadikova; David G Weissman; Maya L Rosen; Elise Robinson; Liliana J Lengua; Margaret A Sheridan; Henning Tiemeier; Katie A McLaughlin

doi:10.1111/jcpp.14067

Identifying cognitive, affective, and developmental mechanisms linking threat and deprivation with adolescent psychopathology

J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2024 Oct 31. doi: 10.1111/jcpp.14067. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Ekaterina Sadikova¹, David G Weissman², Maya L Rosen³, Elise Robinson^{4

5}, Liliana J Lengua⁶, Margaret A Sheridan⁷, Henning Tiemeier¹, Katie A McLaughlin^{2

8}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA.
² Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
³ Program in Neuroscience, Smith College, Northampton, MA, USA.
⁴ Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA, USA.
⁵ Center of Genomic Medicine and Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
⁶ Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.
⁷ Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
⁸ Ballmer Institute, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA.

PMID: 39478358
DOI: 10.1111/jcpp.14067

Abstract

Background: The mechanisms linking early-life adversity with psychopathology over the life-course are complex. In this prospective study, we collectively examined cognitive, affective, and developmental mediators previously found to individually link childhood threat and deprivation experiences to adolescent psychopathology to identify the most potent mechanisms.

Methods: Data came from a community sample of 227 children (mean child age 11.5 ± 0.5 years, 48.5% female) from the Seattle metro area with recruitment designed to reflect diversity in family income. Candidate mechanisms included self-rated pubertal development and task-measured attention bias to threat, emotion regulation, theory of mind, fear learning, inhibitory control, language ability, reasoning, and reward sensitivity. Using a high-dimensional mediation approach, we determined which mediating pathways linking threat and deprivation to psychopathology persisted after controlling for all candidate mechanisms associated with psychopathology. Models additionally controlled for the child's age, sex, early-childhood emotional and behavioral symptoms, poverty, and maternal depression.

Results: Blunted reward sensitivity mediated the prospective relationship between threat and internalizing psychopathology, explaining 17.25% (95% CI 1.08%, 69.96%) of this association. Advanced pubertal development was associated with increases in internalizing and externalizing symptoms (standardized associations of 0.16 (95% CI 0.03, 0.29) and 0.17 (95% CI 0.05, 0.29), respectively), but not with adversity. Although deprivation was strongly related to psychopathology, no mechanisms were empirically identified.

Conclusions: In a well-characterized community sample, we isolated reward sensitivity as a robust mediator of the prospective association between early-life threat and adolescent internalizing psychopathology. Interventions aimed at bolstering reward sensitivity may mitigate the impact of early-life threat experiences on internalizing problems.

Keywords: Adversity; deprivation; high dimensional mediation analysis; psychopathology; pubertal development; reward sensitivity; threat.

Abstract

Grants and funding