BackgroundChildhood adversity poses a major transdiagnostic risk for a host of psychiatric disorders. Altered threat‐related information processing has been put forward as a potential process underlying the association between childhood adversity and psychiatric disorders, with previous research providing support for decreased discrimination between threat and safety cues, in both children and adults exposed to adversity. This altered threat‐safety discrimination has been hypothesized to stem from increased generalization of fear, yet to date, this hypothesis has not been tested in youth.MethodsHere, we investigate whether childhood adversity is associated with fear generalization during adolescence. 119 adolescents between 12 and 16 years of age (mean = 13.95), of whom 63 exposed to childhood adversity, completed a fear generalization paradigm. Fear conditioning was assessed through trial‐by‐trial US expectancy ratings and post‐experimental ratings of fear, valence and arousal. Additionally, we administered a perceptual discrimination task to assess the potential impact of perceptual discrimination abilities upon fear generalization.ResultsIn line with our hypotheses, results showed that childhood adversity is associated with (1) reduced threat‐safety differentiation during fear acquisition and (2) increased fear generalization in both boys and girls, albeit to a different extent, as boys showed more generalization towards safety cues while girls showed more generalization towards dangerous cues. Moreover, this overgeneralization of fear could not be attributed to group differences in perceptual discrimination.ConclusionsAltered fear learning may be an important process through which adversity increases risk for the development of psychopathology. Longitudinal research is essential to elucidate risk and resilience patterns following childhood adversity.

中文翻译：

---

童年逆境与 12 至 16 岁儿童的威胁-安全歧视减少和恐惧普遍化增加有关


背景童年逆境对许多精神疾病构成了重大的跨诊断风险。改变的威胁相关信息处理已被提出为童年逆境与精神疾病之间关联的潜在过程，先前的研究为减少暴露于逆境的儿童和成人对威胁和安全线索的区分提供支持。这种改变的威胁-安全区分被假设源于恐惧的普遍化，但迄今为止，这一假设尚未在青少年中得到检验。方法在这里，我们调查了童年逆境是否与青春期的恐惧泛化有关。119 名 12 至 16 岁的青少年 （平均值 = 13.95），其中 63 名暴露于童年逆境中，完成了恐惧泛化范式。通过逐项试验的美国期望评级和恐惧、效价和唤醒的实验后评级来评估恐惧条件反射。此外，我们还进行了一项知觉辨别任务，以评估知觉辨别能力对恐惧泛化的潜在影响。结果与我们的假设一致，结果表明，童年逆境与 （1） 恐惧获得过程中威胁-安全区分减少和 （2） 男孩和女孩的恐惧泛化增加有关，尽管程度不同，因为男孩对安全线索表现出更多的泛化，而女孩对危险线索表现出更多的泛化。此外，这种对恐惧的过度概括不能归因于感知辨别的群体差异。结论改变的恐惧学习可能是逆境增加精神病理学发展风险的重要过程。 纵向研究对于阐明童年逆境后的风险和复原力模式至关重要。