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Childhood adversity is associated with higher adult weight, but few investigations prospectively test mechanisms accounting for this association. Using two socioeconomically high-risk prospective longitudinal investigations, the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation (MLSRA; N = 267; 45.3% female) and the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS; n = 2,587; 48.5% female), pathways between childhood adversity and later body mass index (BMI) were tested using impulsivity, emotion dysregulation, and overeating as mediators. Childhood adversity from 0 to 5 years included four types of adversities: greater unpredictability, threat/abuse, deprivation/neglect, and low socioeconomic status. Parents reported on child impulsivity, emotion dysregulation, and overeating. Height and weight were self-reported and measured at 32 and 37 years in MLSRA and at 15 years in FFCWS. FFCWS results indicated that threat, deprivation, and low socioeconomic status predicted greater impulsivity and emotion dysregulation at 5 years, which in turn predicted greater overeating at 9 years and higher BMI z-score at 15 years. Early unpredictability in FFCWS predicted higher BMI through greater impulsivity but not emotion dysregulation at age 5. MLSRA regression results replicated the threat/abuse → emotion dysregulation → overeating → higher BMI pathway. These findings suggest that different dimensions of early adversity may follow both similar and unique pathways to predict BMI.

Previous research has demonstrated an inverse relation between subjective social class (SSC) and performance on emotion recognition tasks. Study 1 ( N = 418) involved a preregistered replication of this effect using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task and the Cambridge Mindreading Face-Voice Battery. The inverse relation replicated; however, exploratory analyses revealed a significant interaction between sex and SSC in predicting emotion recognition, indicating that the effect was driven by males. In Study 2 ( N = 745), we preregistered and tested the interaction on a separate archival dataset. The interaction replicated; the association between SSC and emotion recognition again occurred only in males. Exploratory analyses (Study 3; N = 381) examined the generalizability of the interaction to incidental face memory. Our results underscore the need to reevaluate previous research establishing the main effects of social class and sex on emotion recognition abilities, as these effects apparently moderate each other.

Attachment theory posits that early experiences with caregivers are made portable across development in the form of mental representations of attachment experiences. These representations, the secure base script included, are thought to be stable across time. Here, we present data from two studies. Study 1 (

Being able to control oneself in emotionally upsetting situations is essential for good relationship functioning. According to life history theory, childhood exposure to harshness and unpredictability should forecast diminished emotional control and lower relationship quality. We examined this in three studies. In Studies 1 and 2, greater childhood unpredictability (frequent financial, residential, and familial changes), but not harshness (low SES), was associated with lower emotional control in adolescents (N = 1041) and adults (N = 327). These effects were stronger during the participants’ reproductive years. Moreover, in Study 2, greater childhood unpredictability was indirectly associated with lower relationship quality through lower emotional control. In study 3, we leveraged the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation (N = 160). Greater early-life unpredictability (ages 0–4) prospectively predicted lower relationship quality at age 32 via lower emotional control at the same age. This relation was serially mediated by less supportive observed early maternal care (ages 1.5–3.5) and insecure attachment representations (ages 19 and 26). Early unpredictability also predicted greater observed emotional distress during conflict interactions with romantic partners (ages 19–36). These findings point to the role of emotional control in mediating the effects of unpredictable childhood environments on relationship functioning in adulthood.

Contains fulltext : 214433.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) Major life stress often produces a flat diurnal cortisol slope, an indicator of potential long-term health problems. Exposure to stress early in childhood or the accumulation of stress across the life span may be responsible for this pattern. However, the relative impact of life stress at different life stages on diurnal cortisol is unknown. Using a longitudinal sample of adults followed from birth, we examined three models of the effect of stress exposure on diurnal cortisol: the cumulative model, the biological-embedding model, and the sensitization model. As its name implies, the cumulative model focuses on cumulative life stress. In contrast, the biological-embedding model implicates early childhood stress, and the sensitization model posits that current life stress interacts with early life stress to produce flat diurnal cortisol slopes. Our analyses are consistent with the sensitization model, as they indicate that the combination of high stress exposure early in life and high current stress predict flat diurnal cortisol slopes. These novel findings advance understanding of diurnal cortisol patterns and point to avenues for intervention. 9 p.

Contains fulltext : 219590.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) Stressful experiences affect biological stress systems, such as the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis. Life stress can potentially alter regulation of the HPA axis and has been associated with poorer physical and mental health. Little, however, is known about the relative influence of stressors that are encountered at different developmental periods on acute stress reactions in adulthood. In this study, we explored three models of the influence of stress exposure on cortisol reactivity to a modified version of the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) by leveraging 37 years of longitudinal data in a high-risk birth cohort (N = 112). The cumulative stress model suggests that accumulated stress across the lifespan leads to dysregulated reactivity, whereas the biological embedding model implicates early childhood as a critical period. The sensitization model assumes that dysregulation should only occur when stress is high in both early childhood and concurrently. All of the models predicted altered reactivity, but do not anticipate its exact form. We found support for both cumulative and biological embedding effects. However, when pitted against each other, early life stress predicted more blunted cortisol responses at age 37 over and above cumulative life stress. Additional analyses revealed that stress exposure in middle childhood also predicted more blunted cortisol reactivity. 12 p.

Contains fulltext : 221814.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Over the past decade, there is increasing interest in the ways in which environmental unpredictability shapes human life history development. However, progress is hindered by two theoretical ambiguities. The first is that conceptual definitions of environmental unpredictability are not precise enough to be able to express them in statistical terms. The second is that there are different implicit hypotheses about the proximate mechanisms that detect unpredictability, which have not been explicitly described and compared. The first is the ancestral cue perspective, which proposes that humans evolved to detect cues (e.g., loss of a parent, residential changes) that indicated high environmental unpredictability across evolutionary history. The second is the statistical learning perspective, which proposes that organisms estimate the level of unpredictability from lived experiences across development (e.g., prediction errors encountered through time). In this paper, we address both sources of ambiguity. First, we describe the possible statistical properties of unpredictability. Second, we outline the ancestral cue and statistical learning perspectives and their implications for the measurement of environmental unpredictability. Our goal is to provide concrete steps toward better conceptualization and measurement of environmental unpredictability from both approaches. Doing so will refine our understanding of environmental unpredictability and its connection to life history development. 7 p.

Item does not contain fulltext It is well established that people living in adverse conditions tend to score lower on a variety of social and cognitive tests. However, recent research shows that people may also develop 'hidden talents', that is, mental abilities that are enhanced through adversity. The hidden talents program sets out to document these abilities, their development, and their manifestations in different contexts. Although this approach has led to new insights and findings, it also comes with theoretical and methodological challenges. Here, we discuss six of these challenges. We conclude that the hidden talents approach is promising, but there is much scope for refining ideas and testing assumptions. We discuss our goal to advance this research program with integrity despite the current incentives in science. 13 p.

This study examined the predictive significance of maternal sensitivity in early childhood for electrophysiological responding to and cognitive appraisals of infant crying at midlife in a sample of 73 adults (age = 39 years; 43 females; 58 parents) from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation. When listening to an infant crying, both parents and nonparents who had experienced higher levels of maternal sensitivity in early childhood (between 3 and 42 months of age) exhibited larger changes from rest toward greater relative left (vs. right) frontal EEG activation, reflecting an approach-oriented response to distress. Parents who had experienced greater maternal sensitivity in early childhood also made fewer negative causal attributions about the infant's crying; the association between sensitivity and attributions for infant crying was nonsignificant for nonparents. The current findings demonstrate that experiencing maternal sensitivity during the first 3½ years of life has long-term predictive significance for adults' processing of infant distress signals more than three decades later. (PsycINFO Database Record

Although growing up in an adverse childhood environment tends to impair cognitive functions, evolutionary-developmental theory suggests that this might be only one part of the story. A person's mind may instead become developmentally specialized and potentially enhanced for solving problems in the types of environments in which the person grew up. In the current research, we tested whether these specialized advantages in cognitive function might be sensitized to emerge in currently uncertain contexts. We refer to this as the sensitized-specialization hypothesis. We conducted experimental tests of this hypothesis in the domain of working memory, examining how growing up in unpredictable versus predictable environments affects different facets of working memory. Although growing up in an unpredictable environment is typically associated with impairments in working memory, we show that this type of environment is positively associated with those aspects of working memory that are useful in rapidly changing environments. Importantly, these effects emerged only when the current context was uncertain. These theoretically derived findings suggest that childhood environments shape, rather than uniformly impair, cognitive functions. (PsycINFO Database Record

Contains fulltext : 215118.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) According to attachment theory, being securely attached to one's primary caregiver early in life should be related to personality adulthood. However, no studies to date have investigated this key premise using prospective data. To address this gap, we discuss evolutionary-based models of attachment and use them to examine how secure versus insecure children might score differently on Big 5 traits that underlie the meta-trait stability. We modeled data from Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation (N = 170), which has followed participants across 30 years. Participant's early attachment status was assessed in Ainsworth's Strange at 12 and 18 months and personality was assessed on Big 5 measures at age 32. Being securely attached early in childhood predicted three of the Big 5 traits known to tap the meta-trait stability. Specifically, participants rated as secure early in life scored higher on agreeableness and conscientiousness and lower on neuroticism in adulthood, whereas those rated as insecure scored lower on agreeableness and conscientiousness and higher on neuroticism. Exploratory mediation analyses revealed that neither adult attachment representations nor internalizing/externalizing symptoms mediated the association between early security and stability. The implications of these findings for understanding the origins of personality variation are discussed. 17 p.

Item does not contain fulltext Children who experience high-quality early parenting tend to have better physical health, but limited research has tested whether this association extends into adulthood using prospective, observational assessments. Likewise, mechanisms that may explain such links have not yet been illuminated. In this study, we test whether the quality of early maternal sensitivity experienced during the first 3½ years of life predicts cardiometabolic risk at midlife (ages 37 and 39 years) via attachment representations measured in young adulthood (ages 19 and 26 years). We do so by comparing the predictive significance of two different forms of attachment representations coded from the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI): (a) secure base script knowledge and (b) coherence of mind. Using data from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation, we find that early maternal sensitivity is negatively associated with cardiometabolic risk at midlife. Secure base script knowledge (but not coherence of mind) partially mediated this link. These findings are consistent with the possibility that early parenting has lasting significance for physical health in part by promoting higher levels of secure base script knowledge. 17 p.

Can growing up in a stressful childhood environment enhance certain cognitive functions? Drawing participants from higher-income and lower-income backgrounds, we tested how adults who grew up in harsh or unpredictable environments fared on 2 types of executive function tasks: inhibition and shifting. People who experienced unpredictable childhoods performed worse at inhibition (overriding dominant responses), but performed better at shifting (efficiently switching between different tasks). This finding is consistent with the notion that shifting, but not inhibition, is especially useful in unpredictable environments. Importantly, differences in executive function between people who experienced unpredictable versus predictable childhoods emerged only when they were tested in uncertain contexts. This catalyst suggests that some individual differences related to early life experience are manifested under conditions of uncertainty in adulthood. Viewed as a whole, these findings indicate that adverse childhood environments do not universally impair mental functioning, but can actually enhance specific types of cognitive performance in the face of uncertainty.