Trauma exposure, emotion regulation and cognitive skills in early childhood: Prospective and longitudinal examination of the mechanisms of adjustment

 描述(由申请人提供)：暴露在创伤中对幼儿的发展和心理健康有重大影响。拟议的项目是一个更新申请，旨在扩展R01 MH079252-03的结果，该结果成功地测试了302名寄养家庭中的302名青少年样本在三个时间点上潜在保护因素与心理健康结果之间的关系并建立了模型。结果表明，儿童对事件的评价、应对方式或问题解决方式等结构在虐待暴露与适应，特别是攻击性之间起中介作用。此外，结果表明，像智商这样的认知系统对这种关系起到了调节作用。综上所述，这些结果建议了拟议项目中提出的下一系列研究问题。该项目旨在通过将调查范围扩大到更年轻的年龄，更好地阐明评估(或威胁感知)和解决问题的技能(或工作记忆技能)的核心组成部分，这些技能是学龄儿童适应能力的原因。在拟议的项目中，我们将前瞻性地和纵向地评估创伤暴露的维度成分(即频率、慢性化和严重性)如何影响负值系统(威胁)和认知系统(工作记忆)，以预测早期儿童年龄青少年的适应。样本将由180名3-5岁的青年(及其父母和教师)组成，按创伤暴露风险分层，从而有可能确定创伤对样本的不同影响，这些青年的慢性病、频率和严重程度随着时间的不同而不同。该项目将尽可能早地对创伤进行可靠的评估，并提供一个模型测试，了解这些基线创伤和新创伤的维度随着时间的推移如何影响情绪调节和工作记忆。此外，该项目将在最小的合理时间范围内将基线情绪调节和工作记忆功能与创伤后功能进行比较，以便能够比以往任何时候都更可靠地确定事件对青年情绪调节和工作记忆的实际影响。该项目还将通过在暴露-结果关系中考虑父母对儿童的情感反应来扩大工作范围。该项目是重要的和创新的，因为它将包括使用各种模式(生理心率、观察测量、实验室任务、标准化测量和自我报告)的最先进工具来评估情绪调节和工作记忆，以提供最清晰的结构之间相互作用的图景。随着时间的推移，测试创伤维度的模型，并将重点放在情绪调节、工作记忆和亲子互动的核心组成部分上，以此作为创伤如何给发育健康带来风险的机制，这是罕见的，该领域需要取得进展，超越创伤后年轻人表现出(包括积极和有害的)反应的长长清单。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Exposure to trauma has a significant influence on developmental and mental health in young children. The proposed project is a renewal application designed to extend the findings of R01 MH079252-03 that successfully tested and modeled the relation between potential protective factors and mental health outcomes for a sample of 302 youth in foster care over three time points. The results indicated that constructs like child appraisal of events and coping or problem-solving style mediated the relation between maltreatment exposure and adjustment, specifically aggression. Moreover, the results indicated that cognitive systems like IQ operated as a moderator of the relation. Taken together, the results suggest the next line of research questions put forth in the proposed project. The project seeks to better illuminate the core components of appraisal (or threat perception) and problem-solving skills (or working memory skills) that accounted for adjustment in school-age youth by expanding the investigation to a younger age. In the proposed project, we will prospectively and longitudinally assess how dimensional components of trauma exposure (i.e., frequency, chronicity, and severity) influence the Negative Valence System (threat) and Cognitive Systems (working memory) to predict adjustment for early childhood-aged youth. The sample will be composed of 180 youth (and their parents and teachers) ages 3-5 at baseline, stratified by risk for trauma exposure making it possible to identify differential effects of trauma across a sample of youth who vary over time in their exposure to different levels of chronicity, frequency, and severity. The project will assess trauma as early as it can be reliably assessed across the spectrum of events commonly accepted as traumatic and provide a model test of the how the dimensions of those baseline traumas and new traumas over time impact emotion regulation and working memory. Moreover, the project will compare baseline emotion regulation and working memory functioning with post-trauma functioning in the smallest reasonable time frame so that the actual impact of the events on youth emotion regulation and working memory can be more reliably determined than ever before. The project will also extend the work by accounting for parental emotional response to the child in the exposure-outcome relation. The project is important and innovative in that it will include assessment of emotional regulation and working memory using state-of-the-art tools across a variety of modalities (physiological heart rate, observational measures, laboratory tasks, standardized measures, and self-report) to provide the clearest possible picture of the interaction between the constructs. Testing models of trauma dimensions over time and focusing on the core components of emotion regulation, working memory and parent-child interaction as mechanisms of how trauma confers risk to developmental health are rare and needed for the field to advance beyond long lists of the multifinality of responses youth demonstrate (both positive and detrimental) post-trauma exposure.