Gambling against the odds on life’s risks more common after childhood stress

For News Media EMBARGOED BY PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES UNTIL 2 P.M. CST, DEC. Adults who lived high-stress childhoods have trouble reading the signs that a loss or punishment is looming, leaving themselves in situations that risk avoidable health and financial problems and legal trouble. According to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, this difficulty may be biological, stemming from an unhelpful lack of activity in the brain when a situation should be prompting heightened awareness. And that discovery may help train at-risk young people to be better at avoiding risk. "It's not that people are overtly deciding to take these negative risks, or do things that might get them in trouble," says Seth Pollak , a UW-Madison psychology professor who has studied kids and stress for decades. "It may very well be that their brains are not really processing the information that should tell them they are headed to a bad place, that this is not the right step to take." Pollak and UW-Madison psychiatry Professor Rasmus Birn brought back to the lab more than 50 people - now ages 19 to 23 - who were participants in a study Pollak conducted about stress hormones when they were 8 years old. They were drawn equally from that study's least-stressed and most-stressed kids.