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Violence is one of the top contributors to global disability-adjusted life years lost (Haagsma et al., 2016). Disability-adjusted life years (DALY) is a metric primarily used in epidemiology to assess the burden of disease related to total health loss at the population level, considering both premature mortality in years of life lost and non-fatal health outcomes in years lived with disability (Murray, 1994). Importantly, this metric considers years of healthy life lost to disability associated psychopathology as well. The proportion of the total DALY rate attributed to interpersonal violence is particularly high in North America, and among males aged 15-49, relative to other countries and demographic groups respectively (Haagsma et al., 2016). Relatedly, violence broadly poses a substantial global economic burden, resulting in $14.8 trillion in global economic impact in 2017 (Iqbal et al., 2021). Notably, interpersonal violence and violent crimes specifically account for the second largest share of this total (25%), second only to violence containment, which includes military spending, police funding, and spending on the judicial system (Iqbal et al., 2021; McCollister et al., 2010). Given the global health and economic impacts of interpersonal violence, it is important to understand which factors contribute to risk for perpetrating violence at the individual level to aid efforts to develop interventions that may mitigate violent behavior in the population. Some evidence supports the existence of a “cycle of violence,” whereby experiencing violence in childhood facilitates risk for perpetrating violence later in life (Duke et al., 2010; Grasso et al., 2016; Nofziger & Kurtz, 2005; Weaver et al., 2008). Still, few studies have identified the mechanistic underpinnings of this alleged cycle. As such, few behavioral and psychopathological precursors to becoming violence-involved have been explored in developmental samples. Namely, there is a dearth of literature examining the emergence of aggressive behaviors in adolescence, particularly as measured via ecologically-valid tasks, as well as whether any such behaviors arise from experiences of violence in childhood and/or predict future psychopathology. This study addresses these gaps in the literature by examining: 1) whether childhood experiences of violence are related to aggressive behaviors in adolescence, including proactive aggression, using an ecologically valid behavioral paradigm; 2) whether variability in aggression behavior is associated with variability in psychopathology; and 3) whether variability in aggressive behavior mediates the association of childhood experiences of violence with psychopathology.

The COVID-19 outbreak has caused families to experience a wider range of physical and psychosocial stressors. The pandemic has resulted in disruptions in health services (World Health Organization, 2020) and increased distress over contracting the disease or losing family members (Barzilay et al., 2020). The COVID-19 containment measures, such as quarantine, isolation, mandated physical and social distancing and economic lockdown, have restricted families’ access to resources and support systems, and families are faced with loss of childcare, financial instability, and burden of homeschooling (Brooks et al., 2020; Carroll et al., 2020; Fegert, Vitiello, Plener, & Clemens, 2020; Stark, White, Rotter, & Basu, 2020). As families are exposed to chronic stress due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they may be at elevated risk for adverse mental health outcomes (Gruber et al., 2020). In particular, youth’s mental health could be significantly impacted by the pandemic (Gruber et al., 2020; Guessoum et al., 2020). Indeed, children and adolescents have reported elevated levels of anxiety and depression since the COVID-19 outbreak (Duan et al., 2020) and adolescents reported higher prevalence of depression and anxiety than the general population during the COVID-19 pandemic (Zhou et al., 2020). A study that examined the impact of the previous outbreaks (e.g., H1N1, SARS) on mental health revealed that 30% of children who had been isolated or quarantined met criteria for PTSD based on parental reports (Sprang & Silman, 2013). Thus, it is vital to further explore protective factors that can mitigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on youth’s psychopathology. Specifically, parents’ capacities to regulate negative affect during stressful life events may moderate the association between pandemic-related stressors and development of psychopathology in youths. Parental emotion regulation difficulties are associated with child’s internalizing problems (Han & Shaffer, 2013) and emotional difficulties (Zahn-Waxler, Duggal, & Gruber, 2002). One study (Platt, Williams, & Ginsburg, 2016) demonstrated that parents who exhibited excessive worries about their child, which indicates a failure to regulate their own emotions, mediated the association between stressful life events and child anxiety. Also, parents with emotion regulation difficulties may struggle to provide supportive family environment for their child. A recent study (Brown, Doom, Lechuga-Peña, Watamura, & Koppels, 2020) reported that parents who perceived higher levels of stress during the COVID-19 pandemic was more likely to be abusive and less likely to be supportive to their child. These findings suggest that parents who fail to cope effectively with their own stress may struggle to provide support for their child, potentially leading to youth’s adverse mental health outcomes. Parental emotion regulation may be also linked to the development of child’s emotion regulation, which have important implications for youth’s mental health. Indeed, difficulties with emotion regulation have been identified as a well-established mechanism linking chronic stress with psychopathology development for children and adolescents (Kim & Cicchetti, 2010; McLaughlin & Hatzenbuehler, 2009; Weissman et al., 2019). Thus, we explore how parents’ capacities to cope with pandemic-related-stress, specifically parental emotion regulation, impact child’s psychopathology. The current study aims to investigate how exposure to COVID-19 pandemic-related stressors relates to child internalizing and externalizing psychopathology and parental emotion regulation. We also plan to examine how parental emotion regulation relates to child internalizing and externalizing psychopathology during the COVID-19 pandemic. We lastly will explore the mediating role of parental psychopathology and child emotion regulation in the association between exposure to pandemic-related stressors and child internalizing and externalizing psychopathology.

This is a project funded by NIMH (R01-MH103291) that seeks to identify mechanisms linking child maltreatment to child and adolescent psychopathology, with a particular focus on the role of emotion regulation

This is a project funded by NIMH (R01-MH103291, awarded to Dr. Katie McLaughlin) that seeks to identify mechanisms linking child maltreatment to child and adolescent psychopathology, with a particular focus on the role of emotion regulation. Abstract: Childhood adversity is common and strongly associated with risk for psychopathology. Identifying factors that buffer children from experiencing psychopathology following adversity is critical for developing more effective intervention approaches. The present study examined several behavioral metrics of reward processing reflecting global approach motivation for reward and the degree to which reward responses scaled with reward value (i.e., behavioral sensitivity to reward value) as potential moderators of the association of multiple dimensions of adversity—including trauma, caregiver neglect, and food insecurity—with depression and externalizing psychopathology in a sample of youth aged 8-16 years (n = 132). Trauma exposure and externalizing problems were positively associated at low and moderate levels of reward reactivity, but this association became non-significant at high levels of reward reactivity. Our findings extend prior work, suggesting that high behavioral sensitivity to reward value may buffer against externalizing problems following exposure to trauma.

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.

Childhood violence exposure is associated with increased risk for psychopathology, often beginning in adolescence. Difficulties with interoception – the perception of the body’s internal visceral state – have been proposed as a mechanism contributing to transdiagnostic risk for psychopathology in adolescence. However, interoception and its associated neural pathways remain unexplored in children or adolescents. The proposed study will investigate the following hypotheses: 1) greater violence exposure severity is associated with lower interoceptive accuracy on a heartbeat counting task; 2) interoception elicits activation in anterior insula; 3) greater violence exposure severity is associated with lower interoception-related activation in the insula; 4) lower interoceptive accuracy and lower interoception-related activation in the insula are associated with greater transdiagnostic psychopathology. The sample for this study is 80 adolescents aged 13-18 years, over half of whom have some exposure to violence, and 64 of whom completed the MRI task with usable data. To measure transdiagnostic psychopathology, p-factor scores will be calculated. In the scanner, participants push a button with their finger every time they detect a heartbeat while their heart rate is measured. BOLD activation during heartbeat detection compared to pushing the button once a second is used as a measure of neural activation during interoception. For individual differences analyses (hypotheses 3 and 4), individual regions of interest will be identified based on individual and group-level activation to interoception vs. counting seconds within the insula. Findings from this research would establish the neural mechanisms of interoception in adolescence and provide mechanistic insight into the link between violence exposure and psychopathology, informing preclinical interventions for trauma-exposed youth.

Childhood violence exposure is associated with enhanced threat detection, in particular, a greater ability to quickly detect anger. Attentional and cognitive resources prioritizing threat detection may potentially come at the expense of more fine-grained conceptual differentiation between other types of negative emotions. Thus, enhanced threat detection may contribute to lower emotion differentiation among youth exposed to violence. In a community sample of 120 7-19 year old participants with generally low levels of violence exposure, we examined the associations between sensitivity to identifying fear, anger, sadness, and happiness; emotion differentiation; and psychopathology (preregistration: https://osf.io/9xbnk). Greater sensitivity to fear was associated with lower emotion differentiation and lower psychopathology in that sample. Emotion differentiation was not significantly associated with sensitivity to identifying other emotions or with psychopathology. The current study will attempt to replicate those findings in a sample of 80 youth with variable levels of violence exposure. In prior analyses in this same sample (preregistration: https://osf.io/xjmeb), greater violence exposure is associated with significantly lower emotional awareness, which in turn is associated with transdiagnostic psychopathology. Emotion differentiation is not significantly associated with either violence exposure or psychopathology, but in a non-preregistered analysis, emotion differentiation moderates the association between violence exposure and psychopathology, such that the association is weaker when emotion differentiation is higher. Thus, it is possible that greater sensitivity to identifying anger and/or fear among youth exposed to violence may contribute to lower emotion differentiation, which in turn makes them more vulnerable to developing psychopathology. We will evaluate this hypothesis in this study.

This study investigates mechanisms of emotion generalization and differentiation in the adolescent brain and how they are influenced by childhood violence exposure.

Slides from an invited talk delivered on November 6, 2020 at Middlebury College as part of their fall speaker series.

Supplemental material, Kasparek_Supplemental_Material for Reward Processing Modulates the Association Between Trauma Exposure and Externalizing Psychopathology by Steven W. Kasparek, Jessica L. Jenness and Katie A. McLaughlin in Clinical Psychological Science