Sexual Abuse in Adolescents Is Associated With Atypically Increased Responsiveness Within Regions Implicated in Self-Referential and Emotional Processing to Approaching Animate Threats.

Childhood sexual abuse is associated with significant subsequent pathology and neurodevelopmental disruption. In particular, childhood sexual abuse has been associated with heightened threat sensitivity. However, little work has directly investigated this issue. In this study, we examine the association of childhood sexual abuse to neural and behavioral responses to looming, threatening face stimuli. The study involved 23 adolescents with significant past sexual abuse and 24 comparison individuals matched on IQ, age, and sex. Participants were scanned during a looming threat task that involved negative and neutral, human faces and animals that appeared to either loom toward or recede from the participant. We found that adolescents who had been previously subjected to sexual abuse, relative to comparison adolescents, showed increased neural responses to threatening looming stimuli in regions including rostral and superior frontal gyrus as well as posterior cingulate gyrus. In addition, they were significantly more slowed by looming stimuli, particularly if these were human faces, than adolescents who had not been exposed. These data demonstrate that prior sexual abuse was associated with heightened neural responsiveness to looming threats in a series of regions beyond the amygdala. These data are interpreted within models of rostromedial frontal and posterior cingulate cortices that stress their role in self-referential emotional processing and emotional maintenance.

Doing time and the unemployment line: The impact of incarceration on ex-inmates' employment outcomes.

This study measures the influence multiple incarcerations and age at first incarceration have on the lengths of time ex-inmates are not employed and the amount of time ex-inmates spend looking for employment. Fixed effects analyses of longitudinal data from the Rochester Youth Development Study (RYDS) finds a relationship between incarceration at younger ages and longer non-employment experiences, but no association between incarcerations between 23 - 32 years old and non-employment lengths. Meanwhile, these individuals who experience incarceration younger spend equivalent time looking for employment as their never-incarcerated peers, despite having nonequivalent periods without employment.

Do Weapons Facilitate Adolescent Delinquency? An Examination of Weapon Carrying and Delinquency Among Adolescents.

This article examines whether weapon carrying influences the frequency and variety of violent, property, and drug delinquency adolescents commit through fixed-effects analyses of data from the Rochester Youth Development Study (RYDS). We conclude that weapon carrying contributes to violent, substance, and property delinquency, and delinquent behaviors learned during weapon carrying continue to affect substance and property delinquency long after carrying has ceased.