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Up to two-thirds of children reared in the United States experience significant adversity by the time they reach adulthood (Finkelhor, Ormrod, & Turner, 2009; Finkelhor, Turner, Ormrod, & Hamby, 2009; McLaughlin et al., 2012). Evidence supports clustering these highly variable experiences of adversity along two primary dimensions -- threat, which encompasses experiences involving actual harm or threat of harm to survival, and deprivation, characterized by reduced social and/or cognitive inputs throughout development (Mclaughlin et al., 2014; Sheridan & McLaughlin, 2014). Crucially, both of these types of experience are evidenced to impact learning and downstream behavioral and mental health outcomes (Clark, Caldwell, Power, & Stansfeld, 2010; Cohen, Brown, & Smaile, 2001; McLaughlin et al., 2012). Still, the precise mechanisms through which early adversity impacts mental health across development remain poorly understood. One candidate mechanism that has attracted much attention is reward processing. Though reward processing can be broken down into various phases and functions, several prior studies have elucidated global approach motivation for reward (i.e. an organism’s ability to assess the value of reward and exert effort to obtain a reward) and the degree to which reward responses scale with reward value (i.e., behavioral sensitivity to reward value) as mechanisms explaining variability in mental health outcomes following adversity (Dennison et al., 2016; Kasparek et al., 2020; Sheridan et al., 2018; Wismer Fries & Pollack, 2017). Importantly, few studies have examined the associations of different dimensions of early adverse experiences with these reward processing mechanisms and subsequent psychopathology (Dennison et al., 2019; Kasparek et al., 2020). An important difference in these studies is the careful attention to controlling for co-occurring adversity types in statistical models. Initial studies found more consistent support for links between deprivation and blunted behavioral and neural processing (Boecker et al., 2014; Goff et al., 2013; Hanson, Hariri, & Williamson, 2015; Sheridan et al., 2018; Wismer Fries & Pollak, 2017), whereas research examining associations of neuro-behavioral indices of reward processing with threat have been much more mixed (Dillon et al., 2009; Guyer et al., 2006; Hanson et al., 2017). Thus, more evidence is needed to speak to whether distinct forms of early adversity have differential associations with reward processing. Recently, a large study from our lab found similar effects of blunted behavioral reward processing for both early experiences of threat and deprivation, suggesting that disruptions in reward processing may be a common mechanism influenced by numerous forms of early-life adversity (Kasparek et al., 2020). The present study will attempt to replicate this finding in a new sample recruited for variability in early experiences of threat and deprivation. In addition, many of these prior studies have examined either behavioral or neural indices of reward processing, but not in the same sample. As such, the goal of the present study is to examine associations among threat and deprivation, two distinct dimensions of early life adversity, with both behavioral (approach motivation and reward reactivity) and neural (fronto-striatal resting-state functional connectivity) indices of reward processing with concurrent and longitudinal psychopathology outcomes. Key objectives include: 1) examining whether these indices of reward processing function as moderators or mediators of psychopathology outcomes following early adversity. This is important because evidence is mixed such that some studies have found that reward processing is a mechanism linking early-life adversity and psychopathology (particularly depression), whereas other studies suggest that reward processing moderates the association of early-life adversity with psychopathology (including both depression and externalizing behaviors); 2) whether buffering effects of reward processing may be identified to inform intervention approaches for youth who have experienced adversity early in life.

What is missing is the perspective of theatre professionals who keep the industry churning at all levels, across the country. [...]our research—through a survey and individual interviews—seeks to give voice to a wider range of theatre professionals in order to share their ideas and thoughts about the future of our industry. The team used snowball-sampling techniques, a nonprobability sampling method in which existing participants recruit future participants.3 Table 1 provides demographic information of the participants, including years of professional theatre experience, type of work, union membership, type of theatre, occupations, race, gender, sexuality, and employment/income impact due to COVID-19. [...]Caucasian” was the most selected race in our survey, with a considerable skew. Within that 93 percent, three approaches to increasing diversity were most often identified: 65 percent noted a desire for increasing gender and racial diversity on boards and in executive leadership positions;30 percent described a need to increase all hiring opportunities for women, nonbinary, transgender, and differently abled individuals;and 28 percent said they would like to see an increased use of colorblind, color-conscious, and nontraditional casting (fig. 2).4 Responding to the question “As a theatre professional, what is the greatest cultural value of theatre?” 64 percent of survey participants chose “Assembly/shared experience” as one of their top three selections.