Childhood adversity, emotion regulation, and adult psychopathology

Le résumé fourni par la source

Early-life adversity is associated with increased risk of emotional, behavioral, and psychopathological difficulties in adulthood. The present study is grounded in the Adaptive Calibration Model of stress responsivity, which proposes that early environmental conditions shape the development of physiological, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral systems in ways that are adaptive to local environmental demands (Del Giudice et al., 2011). This study examines whether three dimensions of childhood adversity (threat, deprivation, and unpredictability) are associated with adult emotion-regulation strategies and psychopathology. Emotion regulation will be assessed using the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, focusing on cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression (Gross & John, 2003). Psychopathology will be assessed dimensionally using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, with separate measures of internalizing and externalizing symptoms. The study will be conducted in two stages. Stage 1 will examine whether childhood threat, deprivation, and unpredictability are associated with adult cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. A linear model will be estimated first, followed by a quadratic model to assess potential nonlinear associations. The two models will be compared using preregistered Bayesian predictive criteria. Quadratic effects will be examined without directional hypotheses, and the more parsimonious linear model will be retained if predictive performance is comparable. Stage 2 will extend the selected Stage 1 model to adult psychopathology. Cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression will be included simultaneously as parallel mediators of the associations between each adversity dimension and internalizing and externalizing symptoms. The model will estimate the direct paths from adversity to psychopathology, the paths from adversity to emotion regulation, and the paths from emotion regulation to psychopathology. Residual correlations will be estimated between the parallel emotion-regulation outcomes and between the internalizing and externalizing outcomes to account for unexplained covariance. Differences between women and men will be examined using multigroup Bayesian path analyses. These analyses will test whether the pathways linking early adversity, emotion regulation, and psychopathology differ across sex groups. This preregistered study is a secondary analysis of an existing sample of adults residing in the United Kingdom (Farkas et al., 2026, preprint). Using Bayesian path analysis, it will investigate whether emotion regulation helps account for the relationship between distinct forms of childhood adversity and adult psychopathology.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.