Childhood adversity, which robustly predicts psychopathology, refers to negative experiences that deviate from the expectable environment, requiring meaningful adaptation by an average child. These experiences can reflect either threat, defined as relating to harmful experiences, or deprivation, the absence of expected environmental inputs, like caregiver support and cognitive stimulation. This paper focuses on adversity in the form of threat and maltreatment as it has strong ties to depression and anxiety.
Resilience involves processes that buffer children from risk for negative consequences. Identifying mechanisms of resilience may reveal targets for preventative interventions designed to protect children following adversity. This study advances a neurobiological model of resilience, focusing on neural circuits underlying the cognitive control of emotion. The authors posit that a child’s ability to recruit the frontoparietal control network to modulate amygdala reactivity to negative emotional cues buffers risk for internalizing symptoms following exposure to adversity.
Resilience
Various definitions have been proposed by developmental and clinical psychologists. Some have conceived of resilience as a fixed trait or set of traits that are immutable and may be present within an individual whether or not they have experienced adversity. This paper utilizes the definition that resilience reflects an absence of negative outcomes despite exposure to adversity.
Cognitive reappraisal
Cognitive reappraisal involves thinking about a stimulus in a way that changes the meaning to modify one’s emotional response. It has been shown to modulate emotional responses in experimental settings, real-world settings, and clinical intervention studies, where training to enhance reappraisal is associated with reductions in symptoms of depression and anxiety in children and adults.
Cognitive reappraisal neural circuitry in depression and anxiety
Behaviourally, children and adults with depression and anxiety report similar reductions in negative emotion following reappraisal as those without psychopathology. But those with depression and anxiety appear to use less-efficient reappraisal strategies. Disruptions in neural activation in frontoparietal and limbic regions involved in cognitive reappraisal have also been associated with depression and anxiety. But findings vary across age and diagnosis.
Cognitive control circuitry as a mechanism of resilience following childhood adversity
The ability to effectively recruit frontoparietal circuitry in support of effortful emotion regulation strategies could be a critical compensatory mechanism that may help to buffer against the heightened emotional and neurobiological reactivity commonly observed following childhood adversity. Prior work consistently demonstrates that children exposed to diversity exhibit elevated emotional responses to negative stimuli assessed at multiple levels of analysis, including subjective report, autonomic nervous system response, and amygdala reactivity.
The hypotheses were examined in a longitudinal sample of 151 participants 8 to 17 years of age and without history of childhood maltreatment. They completed an emotion regulation task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, which assessed neural activation during passive viewing and effortful attempts to regulate emotional responses to negative stimuli using cognitive reappraisal. Participants reported on their tendency to engage in reappraisal in their daily lives. Symptoms of depression and anxiety were assessed at the time of assessment and in a follow-up assessment two years later. Gender, age, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status were controlled for.
Among maltreated youths, those who were better able to recruit prefrontal control regions and modulate amygdala reactivity during reappraisal exhibited lower risk for depression over time. By contrast, no association was observed between neural functioning during reappraisal and depression among youths without a history of maltreatment.
The ability to modulate negative emotion using cognitive control strategies may represent a resiliency marker, which protects against depression in children who have experienced adversity, for which this report found evidence of such a relationship. Specifically, greater capacity to modulate amygdala activation using cognitive reappraisal predicts decreasing levels of depressive symptoms across a 2-year follow-up period. Preliminary findings support the proposed model of resilience, which underscores a specific neurobiological marker involved in the cognitive control of emotional as a potential protective factor buffering children who have experienced adversity from negative outcomes later in life.
Examining a youth sample is advantageous, as insights about mechanisms of resilience can be leveraged to inform early interventions. Additionally, studies examining resilience to psychopathology in adults who experienced childhood adversity often reflect an accumulation of environmental stressors over the life course and suffer from recall biases that are mitigated somewhat when studying resilience in closer temporal proximity to the initial adversity.
Resilience involves many dynamic and interacting factors that modulate risk in the face of adversity, including cultural, familial, and genetic factors. The current study leverages advances in developmental cognitive neuroscience to examine brain function supporting specific cognitive processes as a mechanistic path to resilience. This analysis on a neuropsychological level is advantageous as it can be used to identify malleable targets for preventing the onset or progression of internalizing disorders.
Exposure to child adversity is a potent risk factor for depression and anxiety. The authors argue that the ability to recruit frontoparietal control networks to modulate amygdala reactivity to negative cues may be a protective factor that buffers children from developing internalizing problems following exposure to adversity. Findings are consistent with this possibility, demonstrating that children who are more able to modulate amygdala reactivity and recruit prefrontal regions of the frontoparietal network during cognitive reappraisal are less likely to exhibit symptoms of depression following exposure to maltreatment – pointing to a potential neurobiological mechanism of resilience. Greater efforts to identify resilience factors at the neural and behavioural levels can provide mechanistic translational targets for interventions aimed at preventing or treating psychopathology among children who have experienced adversity.
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