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Does childhood stress make us more prone to rigid habits?

Patterson TK, Craske MG, Knowlton BJ · Frontiers in psychology · 2019

Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC

Adults with a history of early-life stress are more likely to fall into hard-to-break habits to avoid unpleasant outcomes.

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Key findings

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.

Methodology

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.

Limitations

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.

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