Abstract
Previous studies have reported an association between verbal abuse in early childhood and structural and functional alterations in the young adult brain, supporting the existence of critical periods in human brain development. In addition, exposure to verbal abuse in early childhood is strongly correlated with lifetime psychiatric illness. Resilience is defined as the ability to avoid the negative psychological, biological, and social consequences of stress that impair psychological and physical homeostasis and is used to cope with these psychiatric diseases. We attempted to explain the mediatable present function of resilience and its associations with several psychiatric disorders, with verbal abuse exposure in early childhood and with the present value of the readily measurable and conceptually connected generative Bayesian model parameter. Thirty-six subjects performed a cross-modal associative learning task requiring them to learn the predictive strength of auditory cues and predict a subsequent visual stimulus. The probability of the association changed across each trial block. Subjects’ responses were modeled as a hierarchical Bayesian belief-updating process using a hierarchical Gaussian filter (HGF) with three levels, a Sutton K1 model, and a Rescorla–Wagner model. Subjects completed the Korean version of the Verbal Abuse Questionnaire (VAQ) for segmented periods (aged 0 to 6, 7 to 12, and 13 to 18 years), and their positive self-appraisal was estimated using the Resilience Appraisal Scale (RAS). Random-effects Bayesian model selection identified HGF as the best model. Of the VAQ values for specific periods, only preschool VAQ scores were negatively correlated with RAS scores. The tonic volatility parameter, ω2, of HGF showed a negative relationship with RAS emotion coping scores. The linear regression model explained 18.3% of the variance of emotion coping appraisal with ω2 and preschool VAQ scores. Based on the results obtained from young adults, decrease in emotion coping appraisal can be explained by an increase in the number of experiences of verbal abuse in early childhood and the increased tendency to update beliefs about the cue–outcome associative probability in a volatile environment.
Highlights
The core modulators of stressful experiences are predictability and controllability [1], which are associated with the uncertainty of inputs from the external world
We conducted a parameter recovery simulation to determine whether the three-level hierarchical Gaussian filter (HGF) model displayed internal validity
In this study, using multiple linear regression analysis, we found that decreased emotion coping appraisal of resilience in young adults was explained by an increased tendency to update beliefs about cue–outcome associative probability in a volatile environment and the increase in the parental verbal abuse experienced in early childhood
Summary
The core modulators of stressful experiences are predictability and controllability [1], which are associated with the uncertainty of inputs from the external world. Stress-adaptive behaviors are formed through model updates that predict and estimate uncertainty and precision-weighted prediction error. Many studies examining computational models of this adaptive behavior for input derived from an uncertain environment have employed physically painful feedback [4, 5] social stress [4], and financial reward [2]. We mostly assess uncertainty in decision-making without painful feedback, such as electric shock, in contrast to the experimental environment. Individuals track separable forms of uncertainty sufficiently during tone–picture association learning within a nonstressful context because the uncertain environment is sufficiently stressful for the subjects [6, 7]
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