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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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How this study connects

Role on claims

Each row is a claim on a concept or method page where this paper supports, challenges, or qualifies the statement. Roles are hand-checked — not a model guess.

  • SupportsLearningconcept

    Individual history predicted both the sharpness of learning and its persistence.

    Who learns a discrimination, and how rigidly, varies systematically between people. Higher tension-stress scores and an experimentally induced drop in self-efficacy each impaired discrimination between ambiguous safe and dangerous cues, and each additional point on a childhood trauma questionnaire raised the odds of persistent avoidance habits by 8.3% and 6.6% across two experiments.

    Evidence for the claim as stated.

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Does childhood stress make us more prone to rigid habits?

These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.

189 participants in the first experiment

yielding a sample size of 189 (148 women, 41 men, M age = 20.31 years, SD age = 1.81 years, age range: 18–28 years).

120 trials in the short training condition

participants in the short training condition completed 120 trials (40 per stimulus), and participants in the long training condition completed 600 trials (200 per stimulus).
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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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