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Justice-involved children (JIC) have higher rates of trauma exposure and suicidality than the general population. The Childhood Trauma Model predicts that children can accumulate multiple traumatic experiences that can be more harmful than a single traumatic event. The purpose of this study is to investigate the individual and cumulative effects of childhood trauma on suicidal distress among JIC. The study employs logistic regression to analyze panel data on 2367 12–16 year-olds from the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice (FLDJJ). The study shows that 9 types of individual traumatic experiences increased risk for suicidal ideation from 22 to 180%. For one unit increase in the trauma score, the risk for suicidal distress increased 25%, so that JIC who experienced 5 types of traumas were 2.4 times more likely to experience suicidal distress as JIC who experienced a single trauma. These findings illustrate the need to invest mental health services and suicide prevention resources in populations in the juvenile justice system. Intervention must be tailored to serve children who suffered specific traumatic events, as well as those who experience multiple types of trauma. Further, policies that manage JIC as kid criminals rather than as traumatized children may exacerbate their suicidality and problematic behavior.

Age-related decline in fluid cognition can be characterized as a disconnection among specific brain structures, leading to a decline in functional efficiency. The potential sources of disconnection, however, are unclear. We investigated imaging measures of cerebral white-matter integrity, resting-state functional connectivity, and white-matter hyperintensity volume as mediators of the relation between age and fluid cognition, in 145 healthy, community-dwelling adults 19–79 years of age. At a general level of analysis, with a single composite measure of fluid cognition and single measures of each of the 3 imaging modalities, age exhibited an independent influence on the cognitive and imaging measures, and the imaging variables did not mediate the age-cognition relation. At a more specific level of analysis, resting-state functional connectivity of sensorimotor networks was a significant mediator of the age-related decline in executive function. These findings suggest that different levels of analysis lead to different models of neurocognitive disconnection, and that resting-state functional connectivity, in particular, may contribute to age-related decline in executive function.

Receptive language (e.g., reading) is largely preserved in the aging brain, and semantic processes in particular may continue to develop throughout the lifespan. We investigated the neural underpinnings of phonological and semantic retrieval in older and younger adults during receptive language tasks (rhyme and semantic similarity judgments). In particular, we were interested in the role of competition on language retrieval and varied the similarities between a cue, target, and distractor that were hypothesized to affect the mental process of competition. Behaviorally, all participants responded faster and more accurately during the rhyme task compared to the semantic task. Moreover, older adults demonstrated higher response accuracy than younger adults during the semantic task. Although there were no overall age-related differences in the neuroimaging results, an Age × Task interaction was found in left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), with older adults producing greater activation than younger adults during the semantic condition. These results suggest that at lower levels of task difficulty, older and younger adults engaged similar neural networks that benefited behavioral performance. As task difficulty increased during the semantic task, older adults relied more heavily on largely left hemisphere language regions, as well as regions involved in perception and internal monitoring. Our results are consistent with the stability of language comprehension across the adult lifespan and illustrate how the preservation of semantic representations with aging may influence performance under conditions of increased task difficulty.