Deprivation May Explain the Link Between Early Adversity and Developmental Outcomes in Adolescence

Experiences of early adversity due to poverty, abuse, and neglect are known to interfere with children’s cognitive and emotional development. Recent research in Psychological Science expands on past work by indicating that experiences of deprivation and threat may influence children’s psychological development differently. That is, early deprivation experiences, such as parental neglect and financial difficulties, appear to be more closely associated with cognitive and emotional functioning in adolescence than early threat experiences, such as exposure to abuse.

“A wide range of later difficulties were closely related to early experiences of deprivation, like neglect or growing up in an impoverished environment. This includes both outcomes that classically show a specific link with deprivation, like lower performance on tests of intelligence, and other outcomes, like dealing poorly with your emotions or having conflict with others,” said Sofia Carozza, who conducted this research with Joni Holmes and Duncan E. Astle (University of Cambridge).

The researchers analyzed existing data from a longitudinal study of 14,062 people born in the United Kingdom between April 1991 and December 1992. Specifically, they examined how each child’s exposure to adversity during their first 7 years of life—as reported by their mothers—influenced their cognitive and emotional development in adolescence.

For the first 7 years, mothers reported on their child’s exposure to threats, such as sexual abuse, physical abuse, physical and emotional domestic violence, and physical and emotional parental cruelty, and to deprivations, such as a change in primary caregiver, parental separation, parental neglect, and financial difficulties.

When those children turned 15, the researchers then evaluated their cognitive ability using the vocabulary and reasoning skills sections of the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence and a stop-signal task. This task tests inhibitory control by instructing participants to press one of two buttons when a visual stimulus (an image of the letter “X” or “O”) appears on screen unless that stimulus is followed by a beeping sound, in which case they should inhibit their response and do nothing.

When the children were 16, the mothers reported on their child’s emotional development using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. This includes questions about internalizing problems, such as emotional and peer-relationship issues, and externalizing problems, such as issues with misbehaving and hyperactivity/inattention, that the child may have experienced in the past 6 months.

At age 17, the children also completed an N-back task, which measures working memory by tasking participants with identifying when a number on the screen matches the number presented a certain number of steps back during the task.

Using network analysis, Carozza and colleagues found that adolescents who had more experiences of deprivation during the first 7 years of their lives performed worse on measures of intelligence and cognitive inhibition. Deprivation was also more closely associated with children’s internalizing and externalizing problems than were experiences of threat.

Publication: Andy Boyd , et al., Cohort Profile: The ‘Children of the 90s’—the index offspring of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, International Journal of Epidemiology (2022). DOI: 10.1093/ije/dys064.

Original Story Source: Association for Psychological Science