Abstract
Within a longitudinal study of 1,005 adolescents, we investigated how exposure to childhood psychosocial adversities was associated with the emergence of depressive symptoms between 14 and 17 years of age. The cohort was classified into four empirically determined adversity subtypes for two age periods in childhood (0-5 and 6-11 years). One subtype reflects normative/optimal family environments (n = 692, 69%), while the other three subtypes reflect differential suboptimal family environments (aberrant parenting: n = 71, 7%; discordant: n = 185, 18%; and hazardous: n = 57, 6%). Parent-rated child temperament at 14 years and adolescent self-reported recent negative life events in early and late adolescence were included in models implementing path analysis. There were gender-differentiated associations between childhood adversity subtypes and adolescent depressive symptoms. The discordant and hazardous subtypes were associated with elevated depressive symptoms in both genders but the aberrant parenting subtype only so in girls. Across adolescence the associations between early childhood adversity and depressive symptoms diminished for boys but remained for girls. Emotional temperament was also associated with depressive symptoms in both genders, while proximal negative life events related to depressive symptoms in girls only. There may be neurodevelopmental factors that emerge in adolescence that reduce depressogenic symptoms in boys but increase such formation in girls.
Highlights
Participants determined to be prepubertal at study entry were excluded because research indicates that depressive symptoms and affective disorders markedly rise during puberty and that the relationship between life events and symptoms may change once adolescents enter puberty (Angold et al, 1998; Euling et al, 2008; Rudolph & Flynn, 2007; St Clair et al, 2012)
Using path analyses, specified as structural equation models, we subsequently revealed the longitudinal relationships between exposure to the four childhood adversity classes and depressive symptoms reported at 14 and 17 years
We find that the distal risk factor of negative emotionality is contributing to maintenance of more proximal negative life events leading to increased depressive symptoms in adolescent girls, namely, proximal life events
Summary
We determined whether the distal influence of childhood adversity reduces over time or is maintained across adolescence. We investigated within path analysis whether the long-term effect of childhood adversity to later maladaptive outcomes at ages 14 and 17 is modulated through complex etiological pathways. The possibility of different long-term effects may depend on when the distal childhood adversities occurred Childhood adversity and depressive symptoms and 11 years), so models were run testing the effects of each of the two time periods. Within all of these analyses, we evaluated boy and girl adolescents separately, because we assumed the etiological pathways to increased depressive symptoms may differ between the genders.
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