Neural and behavioral reward responsiveness in early adolescence: longitudinal associations with childhood adversity and resilience

Blunted and maladapted reward responsiveness is a central component of several psychiatric disorders. Identifying how childhood adversity and resilience shape trajectories of reward responsiveness in adolescence is a key step towards understanding why transdiagnostic symptoms such as anhedonia, apathy and impulsivity emerge in young people. Using 3 timepoints from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study (n=11868), we used longitudinal mixed effects models to examine which of 10 adversity factors at age 9/10 were associated with BIS/BAS Reward Responsiveness across ages 9-14, and whether potential resilience factors modify this relationship. To investigate correlations of neural reward responsiveness, we fit similar models on striatal activation measures from an fMRI monetary incentive delay task. We also examined whether the association of adversity with behavioral reward responsiveness was consistent over age. Behavioral reward responsiveness was negatively associated with emotional deprivation from primary (β=-0.076, p<0.001) and secondary caregiver (β=-0.205, p<0.001) and supervisory deprivation (β=-0.103, p<0.001); and positively associated with youth reported threat (β=0.167, p<0.001). Supervisory deprivation was also negatively associated with anticipatory striatal response (β=-0.010, p<0.05), and parent reported threat positively associated (β=0.008, p<0.01). There was a significant interaction between emotional deprivation and age (p<0.001), indicating an association that attenuates with increasing age, and with supervisory deprivation (p<0.001) indicating a negative association that strengthens with increasing age. Overall, early deprivation was associated with reduced reward responsiveness in early adolescence and threat with increased responsiveness. The relationship between deprivation and reward responsiveness varied across age and sex.