Long-term effects of childhood adversity on social processing
Project Description
Childhood adversity significantly increases the risk of developing psychiatric disorders in adulthood. However, the mechanisms underlying this long-term vulnerability remain insufficiently understood. One potential pathway is altered social processing. In social environments, other people can represent both sources of threat and sources of reward. Disruptions in how social signals are perceived, valued, and learned can critically affect social functioning, leading to lower resiliency and poorer mental health. In this project, we investigate how childhood adversity shapes social processing in adulthood and examine the social mechanisms that may link early adverse experiences to increased psychiatric risk later in life. To address these questions, we combine systematic reviews of the existing literature with experimental studies that incorporate psychological and physiological measures, as well as computational modeling. Our current work focuses on two key domains: social learning and social reward processing. In particular, we examine how exposure to childhood adversity impacts individuals’ ability to learn about environmental threats by observing others’ reactions, how they form and update beliefs about others’ prosocial versus antisocial intentions, and how social reward is processed, especially in relation to the motivational and hedonic aspects of social touch.
