3-127 - Early Adversity and Neurodevelopment: Do Different Types of Adversity Shape Neurodevelopment in Distinct Ways?

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

A veritable explosion of research in the last decade has demonstrated robust evidence for long-term consequences of exposure to early adversity across a range of developmental outcomes. This has generated considerable interest in identifying neurodevelopmental mechanisms for these associations. A rapidly growing body of work has examined the impact of early adversity on physiology, neural structure and function, yet few studies attempt to identify the underlying dimensions of environmental experience that might influence neural development. In this symposium, we take a multimodal approach to exploring how different aspects of early life adversity uniquely and differentially influence biological markers associated with risk of psychopathology.

The first paper finds a significant association between maltreatment (adjusting for SES) and brain structure in areas associated with threat-response and emotion regulation (i.e. the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and parahippocampal gyrus). In contrast, the second paper finds an independent effect of poverty (adjusting for maltreatment) on regions of the brain associated with “cold-cognition” using fMRI. The third paper focuses on the effect of maltreatment (in a sample with little SES variability) on reward processing and finds that maltreatment predicts greater neural sensitively to both reward and loss. The fourth paper finds unique effects of objective and subjective measures of deprivation (SES and subjective social status) on developmental changes in sympathetic reactivity to challenge.

Collectively, these papers provide evidence for how the type of adversity experienced early in life may 1) differentially shape biological systems, and 2) may lead to increased risk for specific psychopathological outcomes.

Sub Unit

• Biological Processes

Chairs

• Nicole R Bush, University of California, San Francisco

• Kaja Z. LeWinn, UCSF

Individual Presentations

• Child Maltreatment and Neural Structure - Kate McLaughlin, University of Washington; Presenting Author: Hilary Lambert, Univ of Wash; Margaret A. Sheridan, Harvard University

• Child Poverty and Neural Recruitment During a Spatial Working Memory Task - Presenting Author: Margaret A. Sheridan, Harvard University; Matthew Peverill, University of Washington, Seattle; Kate McLaughlin, University of Washington

• Adversity in Childhood is Associated with Neural Response to Reward in Adolescence - Presenting Author: Kaja Z. LeWinn, UCSF; Colm Connolly, UCSF; Tiffany Ho, UCSF; Eva Henjeblom, UCSF; A. N. Simmons, UCSD; Tony Yang, UCSF

• Developmental Changes in Sympathetic Reactivity—A Mechanism for Social Adversity Effects on Children’s Mental Health? - Presenting Author: Nicole R Bush, University of California, San Francisco; Nancy Adler, University of California, San Francisco; W Thomas Boyce, University of California, San Francisco