In such early adverse environments, rewards and punishments are less predictable and may be qualitatively different from those encountered during more normative rearing experiences. This suggests that altered reward processing is mechanistically implicated in the development of depression.ĭevelopmental histories of abuse and neglect can be characterized as representing atypical experience of reinforcement. Importantly, these alterations are more than simply correlates of concurrent illness, as they have been shown to predict the subsequent onset of symptoms in longitudinal work. Converging evidence shows blunted reward anticipation and poorer ability to adapt behavior as a function of reward in depression, as well as lower neural activation in fronto-striatal circuitry, including the striatum and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Reward processing has received particular attention in the field of depression (for a review see ), and has also been implicated in anxiety (e.g., ). A range of common mental health disorders associated with the experience of maltreatment-including depression, disruptive behavior disorders, and addiction-are characterized by atypical reward processing at both behavioral and neural levels. Īs negative outcomes following maltreatment are extremely diverse, it is likely to be most fruitful to focus on putative transdiagnostic mechanisms implicated in multiple disorders. Candidate cognitive processes in which such changes have been proposed to confer latent vulnerability include threat processing, autobiographical memory processing, executive control, affect regulation, and reward processing. This may, over time, contribute to what has been conceptualized as “latent vulnerability” for a psychiatric disorder. At the neurocognitive level, it has been proposed that certain brain systems adapt in ways that may confer immediate benefits in atypical environments associated with maltreatment, but which are poorly optimized for more normative environments. While these relationships are well established, there is still limited understanding of the mechanisms underlying them. Maltreatment experienced during childhood, such as neglect, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse is associated with a higher risk of poor mental health across a broad range of psychiatric disorders. These findings suggest that disrupted effort-related activation may index latent vulnerability to mental illness in children who have experienced maltreatment. Lower effort-related ACC activation significantly predicted elevated internalizing symptoms at follow-up in the MT group. No group differences were observed in the striatum, or in behavioral indices of reward and effort processing. We identified lower effort-related activation in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a prespecified region-of-interest, in the MT relative to the NMT group. These were used to predict internalizing symptoms at follow-up. Computational models were implemented to extract individual estimates of reward and effort sensitivity, and neural signals during decision-making about different levels of reward and effort were analyzed. Internalizing symptoms were assessed at baseline and again 18 months later. Thirty-seven children with a documented history of maltreatment (MT group) and a carefully matched group of 33 non-maltreated children (NMT group) aged 10–16, completed an effort-based decision-making task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In this longitudinal study of children and adolescents with a documented history of maltreatment, we investigated the impact of maltreatment on behavioral and neural indices of effort-based decision making for reward and examined their associations with future internalizing symptoms.
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