The Effects of Early Psychosocial Deprivation on Mental Health in Early Adulthood

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Project Summary/Abstract Over the past 17 years, we have conducted the first-ever randomized controlled trial (RCT) of foster care as an alternative to institutional care for young children, the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP). We now propose an assessment of the participants in this project at age 21 years. The new assessment period will provide novel and important data regarding the transition to adulthood and allow us to answer timely questions about the possibility that adolescence is a second period of marked sensitivity to environmental influences and neural reorganization during which positive caregiving experiences may mitigate, at least in part, the negative effects of early adversity on cognitive, emotional, and neurobiological processes as well as psychopathology. The proposed analyses will make use of the intensive repeated assessments that have occurred beginning when participants were infants and toddles still living in institutions, following them after randomization to care as usual or foster care placement through childhood and adolescence. The longitudinal design is unique in measuring multiple constructs over time spanning early, middle, and late childhood, as well as the pre-pubertal period and the transition to adolescence. This allows us to examine whether domains of development that were unaffected by the early intervention (e.g., Cognitive Control) may improve during adolescence among children in stable caregiving placements, as well as whether additional improvements occur in domains that were positively influenced by the intervention, but where children continued to show difficulties compared to typically developing children (e.g., Reward Responsiveness). These questions will be examined not only using behavioral data, but also in several neurobiological domains that no prior study of early adversity has assessed over such a long period. This includes EEG, ERP, MRI, and DTI data in the neuroimaging domain, as well as comprehensive measures of cognitive, social, and emotional functioning at every time point. Our longitudinal RCT design with repeated assessment of caregiving relationships, psychopathology, and cognitive, emotional, and brain development allows us to examine the joint influence of early and later caregiving experiences in shaping a wide range of developmental processes. We will examine relations between early and later caregiving experiences and risk for psychopathology during adolescence and early adulthood, periods characterized by markedly elevated risk for the onset of psychiatric disorders. Our unique data allow us to evaluate whether specific domains of cognitive, emotional, and neurobiological development “recover” or “catch up” for children who experienced severe early deprivation followed by stable caregiving in adolescence. We will also assess the effects of early adversity and positive caregiving experiences on the emergence of developmentally appropriate competencies during young adulthood. Determining the relevance of adolescent caregiving experiences in shaping psychopathology in emerging adulthood is essential to designing interventions that have the potential to buffer the effects of early adversity in the US and worldwide.