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3-199 - Contextual Modulation of Threat Processing following Early-Life Adversity

Sat, April 8, 4:30 to 6:00pm, Austin Convention Center, Meeting Room 5A

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Early-life adversity is associated with enhanced threat processing, including attention biases, elevated emotional reactivity, and difficulty modulating responses to threat. Enhanced threat processing might promote safety in dangerous or unpredictable environments, but is also associated with risk for psychopathology. In this symposium, we examine how contextual factors modulate the link between early-life adversity with both threat processing and psychopathology. The first talk documents altered neural and behavioral acquisition of fear during fear-conditioning among previously-institutionalized (PI) children. Enhanced hippocampus-ventromedial-prefrontal-cortex functional connectivity, a pattern associated with effective contextual modulation of fear, predicted lower future anxiety in PI children. The second talk provides evidence for disruptions in contextual processing among children exposed to trauma that emerge specifically in the presence of threat. Trauma-exposed children performed worse on a contextual encoding-retrieval task when asked to remember contexts paired with angry faces and exhibited reduced hippocampal recruitment and heightened hippocampus-ventrolateral-prefrontal-cortex functional connectivity when encoding contexts paired with threat; these patterns of neural recruitment predicted poor context memory. The third talk provides evidence for maternal buffering of threat processing during fear-conditioning in childhood, but not adolescence, in a sample with high trauma exposure. The fourth talk shows that although PI children lacked the regulatory effects of parent stimuli over amygdala reactivity in childhood observed in typically-developing children, children who did exhibit parental buffering of the amygdala were less likely to develop anxiety. Together, this work highlights contextual factors that buffer children from enhanced threat processing and psychopathology following early-life adversity, pointing to novel directions for interventions.

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