Cross-cultural perspectives on young people’s decision-making, adversity, and mental health

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are known to be a key determinant of psychiatric disorders, including anxiety, depression and substance use disorders. While the impact of childhood adversity on mental health has been studied extensively over the past decades, its impact on decision-making is much less researched. Our hypothesis is that sub-clinical mental health disorders linked to childhood adversity experiences are associated with decision-making variations that can be detected using ecological computational tasks.

The field of computational psychiatry has achieved a previously unattainable insight into atypical decision computations in individuals suffering from various mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression. This work has shown sub-clinical symptoms are associated with altered instrumental and contingency learning, as well as altered coupling within key decision networks. A growing body of evidence also indicates structural changes and dysfunctionality of key decision-making nodes in populations in adults with a history of childhood maltreatment and late childhood ACEs.

Given this anatomical overlap, there is a strong argument that decision-making mechanisms may be atypical in individuals with disorders such as depression and anxiety, particularly those with ACEs.
This gap in our knowledge emphasizes the need for translational research to expose the underlying mechanistic changes that ensue from these adverse experiences and their role in the development of psychopathologies in adulthood.

This research project aims to characterise the development of fundamental learning and decision-making mechanisms across young adults that have been previously shown to explain significant variance in mental health conditions. I will translate tasks that promote these mechanisms in ecologically relevant environments to test hypotheses within two different populations in UK and South Africa. With the use of computational models, I will then identify divergences in the trajectory between typical and atypical mental health development as it relates to adversity exposure. This world health perspective would offer a unique opportunity to examine the impact of ACE on computationally precise behavioural mechanisms in two culturally different environments.

Aim: To investigate how the learning and decision-making strategies of young people (aged 18-24 years) in KwaZulu-Natal are influenced by experiences of adversity and their mental health.

Objectives:

1. To examine alterations in decision-making and learning strategies using an ecologically valid task
2. To investigate the relationship between decision-making alterations and childhood adversity experiences
3. To determine the relationship between decision-making alterations and symptoms of poor mental health (depression, anxiety and anhedonia)