"Predicting Late Adolescent Anxiety from Early Adolescent Environmental Stress Exposure: Cognitive Control as Mediator"

Alumna Nancy Tsai (Ph.D. ’18, pictured right) is first author of an article on the influence of early adolescent stress on later adolescent anxiety in Frontiers in Psychology. The title of the article is "Predicting Late Adolescent Anxiety from Early Adolescent Environmental Stress Exposure: Cognitive Control as Mediator​."

​Co-authors are  Associate Professor Susanne M. Jaeggi, Distinguished Professor Jacquelynne Sue Eccles, UC Davis doctoral student Olivia Atherton, and UC Davis Professor Richard W Robins.

Tsai is a postdoctoral research associate at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her expertise includes the effects of stress on prefrontal development and function (e.g. Executive Functions). She is currently working with the Playful Journey Lab on a project developing a game-based assessment for executive functions.

Jaeggi’s research foci include training and transfer, individual differences in working memory capacity and executive control, as well as the nature of working memory limitations across the lifespan. She directs UCI's Working Memory and Plasticity Lab (WMP). Jaeggi is a fellow of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Cognitive Sciences in UCI's School of Social Sciences.

Eccles's academic research focuses on gender-role socialization, classroom influences on student motivation, and social development in the family and school context. She is internationally recognized for her development of the expectancy-value theory of motivation and her concept of stage-environment. ​​Eccles is a member of the National Academy of Education, a World Scholar at the University of London, Visiting Professor at the University of Tubingen, Germany, and Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University, Sydney, Australia. Eccles directs the Motivation and Identity Research Lab (MIRL).

​Abstract

Early exposure to stressful life events is associated with greater risk of chronic diseases and mental health problems, including anxiety. However, there is significant variation in how individuals respond to environmental adversity, perhaps due to individual differences in processing and regulating emotional information. Differences in cognitive control – processes necessary for implementing goal directed behavior – have been linked to both stress exposure and anxiety, but the directionality of these links is unclear. The present study investigated the longitudinal pathway of environmental stress exposure during early adolescence on later adolescent anxiety, and the possible mediating mechanism of cognitive control. Participants were 674 Mexican-origin adolescents (mean age = 10.8 years, 50% male) enrolled in the California Families Project, an ongoing longitudinal study of Mexican-origin families. In the current analysis, we examined self-reports of environmental stressors at age 14 (Time 1), cognitive control at age 16 (Time 2), and anxiety at age 18 (Time 3). Structural equation modeling revealed that environmental stressors (Time 1) had both direct and indirect effects on later anxiety (Time 3) through their effects on cognitive control (Time 2), even when accounting for prior levels of anxiety (Time 2). Cognitive control accounted for 18% of the association between environmental stressors and adolescent anxiety: an increase in stressors decreased cognitive control (β = −0.20, p < 0.001), however, cognitive control buffers against anxiety (β = −0.10, p = 0.004). These findings deepen our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the development of anxiety and highlight the importance of cognitive control as a potential protective factor.