Background

Childhood adverse experiences may come to bear particularly during adolescence, when neural reward systems are developing rapidly and psychopathology spikes. Despite prior work differentiating threat- (abuse) vs. deprivation- (neglect) related adversity, no research has yet identified their relative nor interactive contributions to reward neural substrates during adolescence. In the present study, we leveraged a diverse sample of adolescents with different childhood adversity profiles to examine neural responses to reward in relation to varying degrees of abuse vs. neglect.

Methods

Adolescents (N = 45; 23 females; mean age = 14.9 years, SD = 1.9) completed a child-friendly monetary incentive delay task during fMRI acquisition. The self-report Childhood Trauma Questionnaire assessed childhood abuse and neglect. Whole brain ANCOVA analyses evaluated reward anticipation (reward vs. no reward expected) and feedback (hitting vs. missing the target with a reward vs. no reward) in relation to abuse and neglect dimensions.

Results

Whole-brain analyses revealed that abuse, adjusted for neglect, is associated with greater differences between task conditions (reward vs. no reward, hit vs. miss) in regions associated with threat/emotion regulation (prefrontal and temporal cortices, as well as posterior regions including fusiform and posterior cingulate/precuneus). Additionally, level of neglect modulated neural response associated with abuse in prefrontal and temporoparietal regions, such that youths with high levels of both abuse and neglect showed qualitatively different, more exaggerated neural patterns compared to youths with elevated adversity in only one dimension.

Conclusions

Our findings suggest that early experiences of abuse and neglect have a long developmental reach resulting in reward-related neural alterations in adolescence. Moreover, our results bolster theoretical conceptualizations of adversity along threat and deprivation dimensions and provide evidence that “adding up” adverse life events may not be sufficient to capture the qualitatively different neural profiles produced by differing combinations of types of adversity, which may in turn necessitate different treatment approaches.

中文翻译：

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童年虐待和忽视对青春期神经基质的奖励作用

 背景

童年时期的不良经历可能会产生影响，尤其是在青春期，此时神经奖励系统正在迅速发展，精神病理学会出现高峰。尽管之前的工作区分了威胁（虐待）与剥夺（忽视）相关的逆境，但尚未有研究确定它们对青春期奖励神经基质的相对或交互贡献。在本研究中，我们利用具有不同童年逆境特征的青少年的不同样本来检查与不同程度的虐待和忽视相关的奖励神经反应。

 方法

青少年（N = 45；23 名女性；平均年龄 = 14.9 岁，SD = 1.9）在 fMRI 采集期间完成了儿童友好的金钱激励延迟任务。自我报告的童年创伤问卷评估了儿童时期的虐待和忽视。全脑 ANCOVA 分析评估了与滥用和忽视维度相关的奖励预期（奖励与无奖励）和反馈（击中目标与未达到目标，有奖励与无奖励）。

 结果

全脑分析显示，根据忽视进行调整后的虐待与威胁/情绪调节相关区域（前额皮质和颞叶皮质，以及后皮质）的任务条件（奖励与无奖励、命中与未命中）之间的更大差异相关。区域，包括梭形和后扣带回/楔前叶）。此外，忽视程度调节了前额叶和颞顶叶区域与虐待相关的神经反应，因此与仅在一个维度上逆境程度较高的青少年相比，遭受虐待和忽视程度较高的青少年表现出本质上不同、更夸张的神经模式。

 结论

我们的研究结果表明，早期的虐待和忽视经历会对青少年的发育产生长期影响，导致青春期与奖励相关的神经改变。此外，我们的结果支持了沿着威胁和剥夺维度逆境的理论概念化，并提供了证据，表明“加起来”不利的生活事件可能不足以捕捉由逆境类型的不同组合产生的性质不同的神经特征，这反过来可能需要不同的治疗方法。