Adolescent Neurodevelopment of Negative Emotion Processing and the Moderating Role of Traumatic and Adverse Childhood Experiences
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Childhood adversity (e.g. physical or sexual abuse, family conflict, discrimination, poverty) is common in youth, with up to 67% reporting exposure to one or more traumatic in United States (Finkelhor et al., 2015). Increases in emotional reactivity and difficulties with emotion regulation are strongly associated with childhood adversity, and are thought to be a core feature that increases the risk for psychopathology. However, heterogeneous adverse environments differentially moderate risk for mental health problems in adolescents (Russell et al., 2025), suggesting that neurodevelopmental alterations following childhood adversity are specific to their environment (Teicher et al., 2016). The impact of different adverse environments on the neurodevelopmental trajectories of emotion processing remain poorly understood, limiting mechanistic insights into adolescent-emergent psychopathology. The proposed research will characterize developmental trajectories of negative emotion processing using longitudinal data from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. Here, we will assess the moderating effect of eight different traumatic and adverse childhood experiences (TRACEs; Weems et al., 2021; Russell et al., 2025) on neural trajectories of emotion processing during the emotional N-Back task.
Language: English
Topic: Child Abuse and Trauma
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7172117266