Linking Early Life Stress and Psychopathology through Neural Correlates

Abstract

Early life stress is thought to impact the brain, leading to alterations in normative cognitive and emotional development, which may contribute to the emergence of psychopathology. However, there is a lack of longitudinal studies examining neural measures as mediators of the relationship between early life stress and psychopathology. Furthermore, our understanding can be significantly improved by utilizing hierarchical modeling to reveal the inherent organization of early life stress and psychopathology. To this aim, the current study 1) examined whether environmental stressors (general environmental stress, family dynamics, interpersonal support, neighborhood SES deprivation, and urbanicity) derived from hierarchical modeling are associated with greater psychopathological symptoms (general psychopathology, internalizing symptoms, ADHD symptoms, and conduct problems) longitudinally, and 2) determined whether neural structures measured by regional brain volume, cortical thickness, and surface area mediate the putative association between environmental stress and psychopathology. Study 1 found that the general environmental stress factor predicted greater conduct problems and ADHD symptoms at the third-year follow-up, whereas it predicted lower general psychopathology and internalizing symptoms after controlling for baseline psychopathology symptoms. Family dynamics predicted psychopathology symptoms in all domains. Neighborhood SES deprivation predicted conduct problems specifically, whereas urbanicity showed divergent effects in predicting specific factors of psychopathology. Study 2 found that brain regions implicated in the frontal, default mode, motor, and reward processing networks mediated the relationship between early life stress and later psychopathology. Taken together, the results of this study suggest that early life stress is associated with later psychopathology and the neural substrates found in the current study may inform risk factors that underlie the development of future psychopathology.