Why is it important to understand childhood adversity? 👧👦

Childhood adversity: a profound determinant of health (The Lancet Public health, 2021, 6(11): e780.)

Childhood adversity is one big public health issue and may lead to adulthood illness, not only including mental health probelms but also many physical problems. A safe and healthy childhood are fundamental to physical, mental, and social development. I am deeply interested in exploring the trans-diagnostic mechanisms of childhood adversity. My work seeks to understand how experiences of stress, trauma, neighborhood risk and social disadvantages in childhood alter developmental processes in ways that increase risk for psychopathology. Understanding these mechanisms is critical for the development of interventions to prevent the onset of psychopathology in children who experience adversity.

I am trying to understand childhood adversity and psychopathology from different levels:

* Theory/Goal Level: life history theory; the Stress Acceleration Hypothesis

* Algorithm Level: accelerated aging, different attachment styles, dsyregulated emotion regulation, abnormal reward/threat processing, abnormal metabolism

* Implementation Level: higher inflammation, abnormal neurocognition, more risk-taking behaviours

📢 Call for collaborator: if you are interested in childhood adversity and psychopathology, and if you have an expertise on reinforcement learning and decision making, I have some interesting research ideas in my mind and would like to share with you.

Working papers/projects

1. Relationship between childhood adversity and psychopathology in general population: exploring the multiple pathways from a network perspective

2. Inter-relationships among childhood adversity, polygenic risk score, psychopathology, and cognition in first-episode psychosis

3. Abnormal structured covariance network in childhood trauma-exposed psychosis.

Other collaborative projects (I am not the leading person)

1. The dose-response effect of childhood adversity on the risk of psychosis. (collaboration with Richard Bentall, Filippo Varese and their PhD student; contributions to data acquisition, interpretation, review for the work)

2. Impaired reward representations in schizophrenia and depression: re-evaluate the underpinnings of anhedonia from a transdiagonostic perspective. (collaboration with Chao Yan and his students; contributions to conception, study design, data acquisition, interpretation, and manuscript reviewing)

Under review

Zhou, L., Sommer, I.E., … & Begemann, M. J. Chilhood adversity is associated with accelerated brain aging: evidence from a transdiognostic sample

Zhou, L., Sommer, I. E., Yang, P., Sikirin, L., van Os, J., Bentall, R. P., … & Begemann, M. J. What Do Four Decades of Research Tell Us About the Association between Childhood Adversity and Psychosis: An Updated and Extended Multi-Level Meta-Analysis. Available at SSRN 4813693.

Zhou, L., Cai, T., Ip, K. The association between neighborhood opportunity, cognitive function, and brain structure in youth: findings from ABCD study. Stage 1 was accepted by Biological Psychitry: Global Open Science (https://osf.io/rm3an/)

Published papers

Zhou, H. Y., Zhou, L., Zheng, T. X., Ma, L. P., Fan, M. X., Liu, L., … & Yan, C. (2024). Unraveling the link between childhood maltreatment and depression: Insights from the role of ventral striatum and middle cingulate cortex in hedonic experience and emotion regulation. Development and psychopathology, 1-11.

Grants

1. From the Window into the Brain: Investigating the Association between Childhood Trauma and Retinal Structural Changes in First-Episode Psychosis, 2024-2026, €4600, De Cock-Hadders Foundation.

2. Tracing Shadows: Unraveling the Influence of Childhood Trauma on Adulthood Brain Aging through Machine Learning, 2023-2024, €4000, Early Career Interdisciplinary Scholars Seed Grant, University of Groningen.