Does childhood stress make us more prone to rigid habits?
Adults with a history of early-life stress are more likely to fall into hard-to-break habits to avoid unpleasant outcomes.
Source
Enhanced Avoidance Habits in Relation to History of Early-Life Stress
What they did
In the first experiment, 189 college students completed an avoidance task where they learned to press keyboard buttons to stop an unpleasant noise in either their left or right ear. Half the participants received a shorter training run of 120 trials while the others received a longer run of 600 trials. After training, an earphone was taken off to make the associated behavior useless, and researchers tracked if participants kept pressing the button. The second experiment used 112 new participants and introduced a counting distraction task during 360 training trials.
What they found
In both experiments, individuals reporting higher levels of early-life stress had a significantly higher likelihood of forming persistent habits to avoid the noise. Each point increase on the childhood trauma questionnaire boosted the odds of habitual responding by 8.3% in the first experiment and by 6.6% in the second. Neither the length of training nor the presence of distraction had a significant impact on whether participants developed habits.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Because the participants were young, healthy university students, the results might not represent the general population or individuals with severe clinical trauma. The study used self-reported retrospective questionnaires to assess childhood stress, which are subject to memory bias. Additionally, because the study is correlational, it cannot prove that early-life stress directly causes the brain to favor habit formation over goal-directed actions.
Key terms
- Early-life stress (ELS)
- Stressful or traumatic experiences, such as abuse or neglect, that occur during childhood development.
- Stimulus-response habit
- An automatic, learned behavior triggered by a specific environmental cue, which persists even when the behavior no longer leads to a desired or useful outcome.
- Goal-directed action
- A flexible behavior driven by the anticipation and subjective value of its current outcome.
- Outcome devaluation
- An experimental technique used to test if a behavior is habitual by making its reward or consequence no longer valuable or necessary and observing if the subject continues the behavior.
- Extinction
- A testing phase in learning experiments where the usual consequences of a behavior are withheld to see if the behavior persists.
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Quiz yourself
How does the paper define stimulus-response (S-R) habits?
Common questions
Why did the researchers use a female scream instead of a standard reward like money?
The study focused specifically on avoidance habits rather than appetitive habits, so they used an unpleasant sound to simulate an aversive event that participants would naturally want to escape.
Did longer training sessions make habits stronger?
Surprisingly, no; giving participants a much longer training session did not significantly change their tendency to form habits.
How did they determine if someone's response was a habit?
After participants removed one earphone (meaning they could no longer hear noise in that ear), any continued button-pressing to avoid noise in that specific ear was classified as a habit because it was completely unnecessary.
What is the clinical significance of these findings?
This suggests that childhood stress may alter brain pathways in a way that favors rigid habits, potentially explaining why early-life stress is linked to repetitive, health-harming behaviors like overeating or substance abuse in adulthood.
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