Study Finds Childhood Challenges May Build Resilience Against Anxiety Disorders
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Research has shown that young people who face adversity such as traumatic or stressful events during brain development are 40% more likely to develop anxiety disorders by adulthood. But most people who endure these experiences during childhood and adolescence prove to be resilient to these mental health effects. A new Yale study finds that when this adversity occurs during brain development may affect how susceptible people are to anxiety and other psychiatric problems as adults.
According to the study, published in the journal Communications Psychology, experiencing low-to-moderate levels of adversity during middle childhood and adolescence may foster resilience to anxiety later in life. The researchers found that those individuals who developed resilience to mental health challenges exhibited distinct patterns of brain activation when asked to differentiate between danger and safety, a process that is known to be disrupted in people with anxiety disorders.
For the study, the researchers assessed patterns of adversity exposure in 120 adults across four stages of development: early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Using neuroimaging technology, they examined participants’ corticolimbic circuitry (a network of brain regions that integrates emotion, cognition, and memory), extracting measures of neural activation as participants viewed cues that signaled either threat or safety.
“The people who showed low or moderate levels of adversity exposure in middle childhood and adolescence had statistically lower levels of anxiety than either the first group, which had the lowest levels of adversity overall, or the third group, which had the highest levels of adversity exposure,” said Lucinda Sisk, the lead author of the study.
Three latent profiles emerged: (1) a group with lower lifetime adversity, higher neural activation to threat, and lower neural activation to safety; (2) a group with moderate adversity during middle childhood and adolescence, lower neural activation to threat, and higher neural activation to safety; and (3) a group with higher lifetime adversity exposure and minimal neural activation to both threat and safety. Individuals in the second profile had lower anxiety than the other profiles.
These findings demonstrate how variability in within-person combinations of adversity exposure and neural threat/safety discrimination can differentially relate to anxiety, and suggest that for some individuals, moderate adversity exposure during middle childhood and adolescence could be associated with processes that foster resilience to future anxiety.
Ref: Sisk, L.M., Keding, T.J., Ruiz, S. et al. Person-centered analyses reveal that developmental adversity at moderate levels and neural threat/safety discrimination are associated with lower anxiety in early adulthood. Commun Psychol 3, 31 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-025-00193-x
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