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

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.