Department of Psychology, Yale University, USA.
Department of Psychology, Columbia University, USA.
Dev Cogn Neurosci. 2023 Jun;61:101256. doi: 10.1016/j.dcn.2023.101256. Epub 2023 May 18.
Early-life adversity has profound consequences for youth neurodevelopment and adjustment; however, experiences of adversity are heterogeneous and interrelated in complex ways that can be difficult to operationalize and organize in developmental research. We sought to characterize the underlying dimensional structure of co-occurring adverse experiences among a subset of youth (ages 9-10) from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study (N = 7115), a community sample of youth in the United States. We identified 60 environmental and experiential variables that reflect adverse experiences. Exploratory factor analysis identified 10 robust dimensions of early-life adversity co-occurrence, corresponding to conceptual domains such as caregiver substance use and biological caregiver separation, caregiver psychopathology, caregiver lack of support, and socioeconomic disadvantage / neighborhood lack of safety. These dimensions demonstrated distinct associations with internalizing problems, externalizing problems, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control. Non-metric multidimensional scaling characterized qualitative similarity among the 10 identified dimensions. Results supported a nonlinear three-dimensional structure representing early-life adversity, including continuous gradients of "perspective", "environmental uncertainty", and "acts of omission/commission". Our findings suggest that there are distinct dimensions of early-life adversity co-occurrence in the ABCD sample at baseline, and the resulting dimensions may have unique implications for neurodevelopment and youth behavior.
早期生活逆境对青少年的神经发育和适应有深远的影响；然而，逆境的经历是多种多样的，并且以复杂的方式相互关联，这在发展研究中很难操作和组织。我们试图描述青少年大脑认知发育研究（ABCD 研究）中（N=7115）青少年亚组（年龄 9-10 岁）中共同发生的不良经历的潜在维度结构，这是美国的一个社区青年样本。我们确定了 60 个反映不良经历的环境和体验变量。探索性因素分析确定了 10 个稳健的早期生活逆境共同发生维度，对应于概念领域，如照顾者物质使用和生物照顾者分离、照顾者精神病理学、照顾者缺乏支持以及社会经济劣势/邻里缺乏安全。这些维度与内化问题、外化问题、认知灵活性和抑制控制有明显的关联。非度量多维标度描述了 10 个确定维度之间的定性相似性。结果支持了一种非线性的三维结构，代表了早期生活逆境，包括“观点”、“环境不确定性”和“作为或不作为”的连续梯度。我们的研究结果表明，ABCD 样本在基线时存在明显的早期生活逆境共同发生维度，并且由此产生的维度可能对神经发育和青少年行为有独特的影响。
