Childhood Adversity May Affect Processing in the Brain’s Reward Pathways

Scientists at Harvard University used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor brain activity as participants played a game involving cues that predicted monetary rewards and penalties. “We found that, in comparison to community controls, young adults who had experienced childhood adversity showed weaker responses to reward-predicting cues in left hemisphere regions of the basal ganglia, a part of the brain that is important for orchestrating goal-directed actions,” says Diego Pizzagalli, the John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Psychology at Harvard. The research is published in the current issue of the journal Biological Psychiatry, and was conducted by Pizzagalli and Karlen Lyons-Ruth, associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School. The lead author is Daniel Dillon, a postdoctoral researcher working with Pizzagalli, and co-authors were Avram Holmes, Jeffrey Birk, and Nancy Brooks, all in the Department of Psychology in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “In the group that had childhood adversity, two structures in the left basal ganglia were not responsive to reward cues, which differed from what we saw in the control group,” says Dillon. “There weren’t any differences between the controls and maltreated participants in response to cues that predicted either penalties or no incentive outcomes. In other words, the group that had experienced childhood adversity only showed a weaker response to the reward cues.