ArticleJournal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines2025
Identifying cognitive, affective, and developmental mechanisms linking threat and deprivation with adolescent psychopathology.
Article in Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Dimensions of Early-Life Adversity and Attention Biases in Childhood and Adolescence: A Systematic Review.Clinical child and family psychology review · 2026Review
- Domain Generality or Domain Specificity? The Associations Between Family Adversity, Irritability, and Psychopathology in Adolescence.Child psychiatry and human development · 2026Article
- Better Safe Than Sorry? Exploratory Associations Between Fear-Learning Processes and Later Paranoia in Threat-Exposed Adolescents in Standardized Virtual Reality Environments.Schizophrenia bulletin open · 2026Article
- Sex-Specific Effects of Early-Life Unpredictability on Hippocampal and Amygdala Responses to Novelty in Adolescents.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2025Article
- Residence in Communities With Higher Violent Crimes Associated With Lower Reward-related Brain Function.Biopsychosocial science and medicine · 2025Article
- Parental History of Major Depressive Disorder Moderates the Relation Between Neighborhood Disadvantage and Reward Responsiveness in Children.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundThe 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.
methodsData 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.
resultsBlunted 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.
conclusionsIn 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.
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