What Do We Really Know About Trauma and Substance Use?

Teresa: Hi, I’m Teresa Huizar, your host of One in Ten. In today’s episode, what do we really know about trauma and substance use? I speak with Dr. Nick Morrelli, clinical psychologist and researcher. What is the link between childhood adversity and substance abuse, both in youth and in early adulthood? We know that some children who’ve experienced abuse and other forms of adversity may turn to substances—alcohol, cannabis, opioids, and others—to try to mute their suffering.

But as you will hear, the relationship is more complex than we thought. What is the actual relationship between substance abuse and ACEs? What factors are more predictive of higher levels of use? And how do we screen early for these issues in hopes of heading off larger problems down the road? I know you’ll be as interested in this conversation as I was.

Please take a listen.

Hi, Nick. Welcome to One in Ten.

Nick: Thanks for having me.

Teresa: So how did you come to this work really examining the relationship between substance use and adversity?

Nick: Substance use is not my area of expertise. I did a lot of work related to maltreatment, understanding the causes, the consequences of maltreatment, and I think substance use is a fairly common outcome.

I think it’s a very relevant outcome, and so it was something I was interested in looking at.

Teresa: So in the particular study that we’re talking about today, talk a little bit about what your research questions were. What did you set to find out?

Nick: Yeah. Throughout grad school, I worked with a data set known as the LongSCAN study, the Longitudinal Studies of Child Abuse and Neglect.

This is a really fascinating study and really unique study, 30 years ongoing, looking longitudinally at different life experiences, maltreatment, how that impacts kids and families across their lifespan. And one of the major outcomes that I was interested in for this paper was understanding not just substance use as a whole, but specific profiles of substance use, specific patterns of substance use.

Obviously, there’s a lot of different substances out there. They all have very different psychoactive effects. Some people, you know, use substances differently. Some are more culturally, societally accepted. And so we were really curious to understand what do these different profiles look like? Are there certain groups within our high-risk sample that gravitate towards certain substances?

Are there groups that tend to abstain? And what does that look like?

Teresa: So let’s break down the groups, because I think we’re going to need to talk about them throughout the conversation today. So how did you group them? What does it mean when we’re talking about, for example, smokers or depressant users or poly-users or whatever other categories may have existed?

Nick: Sure. Maybe it’ll be helpful to talk about the statistical technique that we used to do this. We used a technique called latent class analysis, which is considered a person-centered statistical method. A lot of other methods tend to ask the question: How is this experience related to this outcome on average across an entire sample?

Latent class analysis asks more of the question: are there subgroups of people who respond, you know, whose responses resemble one another? So are there different patterns? And so we feed the substance use data into the model. We ask our participants about their use of different substances. We looked at nine different substance use indicators, and then we see what are the patterns that come out based on that data.

The model came out with four different profiles, four different patterns that tended to capture most people in the sample. The first pattern was actually the largest profile in the sample, what we called abstainers. These individuals made up about 75 to 80% of the sample. For the most part, they abstained from most illicit or nonprescription substances, and their use of, for example, alcohol and cannabis was right around, if not lower than, the general population.

So this is a fairly big group.

Teresa: Well, let’s stop there for a second.

Did that surprise you?

Talk about that a little bit.

Nick: Yeah, a big surprise for us. LongSCAN is a very high-risk sample. These were kids who were originally recruited when they were four years old.

Most of them had a child abuse or neglect report filed at that point. Many more were considered at high risk of maltreatment, and these kids were followed throughout their lifetime. We were now looking at these, I say kids, they were 24 years old at the time that we were asking about their substance use.

So this is a high-risk sample. We expected a much greater percentage to be really struggling with substance use. We expected our poly-use group, which I can talk about in a bit, to be a much larger proportion, but that’s not what we found. We found that, like I said, about 70 to 80% of the sample were quite resilient in that way.

They were not showing patterns of substance use that were particularly concerning.

Teresa: And although the study didn’t cover it, I wonder if you have, just in your own mind, a hypothesis about why that might be true. I mean, is it because they’re Gen Z, who drink less anyway? Is it, you know, that these are kids who may have had more access to treatment over time than other kids, or is it something else in your view?

Nick: It’s a good question. I think it’s sort of the million-dollar question. Yeah. Other similar studies looking at high-risk samples have found higher rates of substance use than what we found. I think there’s a couple theories. I think one is, like you said, perhaps more access to resources. I mean, when you are able to follow a group of kids, watching and observing the transition into adulthood, those that tend to stick around and are available to be studied tend to be the ones where things are maybe going a little bit better in their lives.

A more stable lifestyle, those kinds of things.

And, you know, the original LongSCAN study, when these kids were recruited at around two to four years old, there were about 1,300 of them.

We were looking at a subsample of about 500, which is a significant subsample, but a minority of the original sample.

Many of the individuals in the original study were lost to follow-up. There was attrition. I think that’s an important caveat to think about as well.

Teresa: Yeah. Then you may have actually studied the most stable population you could have, because they’re the ones that were available and responded to your inquiries.

Okay, so now we’ve touched a little bit on the abstainers. What were the others that you found?

Nick: The other three patterns, or profiles, of substance use were the higher-risk groups, the first being smokers. And again, these are qualitative labels that we came up with to best characterize the groups.

Smokers comprised about 14% of the sample. These were individuals who reported very high rates of tobacco use in the past 30 days and elevated cannabis use disorder symptoms. So we characterized this group as smokers. The other two profiles we identified were depressant users and poly-users. The depressant users were a pretty small proportion of the sample.

This was about 5% of the sample. These were individuals, all of whom reported opioid use in the past year, as well as elevated use of nonprescription tranquilizers and sedatives. These are things like Xanax and Valium, and so we characterized this group as our depressant users. And then the final profile that emerged was the poly-users.

This is a pattern that often emerges in this kind of research. This is the smaller percentage, smaller proportion of individuals who are reporting, use of lots of different substances. So elevated probabilities across many different substance use categories, especially things like alcohol, cannabis use, cocaine, amphetamines.

Not everybody within this profile reported using all those substances, but this was really our multi-substance-use group.

Teresa: So let’s start back with the smokers for a moment. What did you see in terms of any patterns in adversity? So what did you see were, if there were any common patterns in the types of adversity that they had experienced when they were much younger, or things that you were currently seeing that they were essentially using the smoking or cannabis use to essentially treat?

Nick: Yeah. Really, I think the most interesting finding, so first, the main focus of this study was to understand in this high-risk sample, what are the patterns of substance use that emerge? What are the profiles? And then our secondary aim, in a more exploratory way, was to understand how are these profiles linked to earlier prospectively measured adversity as children.

We were also looking at more recent experiences, so adult adversity, things like intimate partner violence, traumatic loss. We looked at other sociodemographic variables. The big pattern that emerged in this particular study is that there was really not one adversity, one particular type of event that was strongly predictive of a specific substance use pattern.

Really, the broader takeaway for us was what you could imagine, which is more adverse childhood experiences, more ACEs tended to predict membership in one of those three high substance use groups. That was really the big takeaway. I will say caregiver substance use, not surprisingly, was a pretty consistent predictor of membership in the poly-use group.

You mentioned smokers. Caregiver mental illness was one of the ACEs, adverse childhood experiences, that tended to predict membership in that smoking group. And then we also saw emotional abuse as an early childhood adverse experience that tended to predict membership in the depressant users group.

So a couple of specific ACEs emerged, but on the whole, really the pattern was more adverse childhood experiences tended to predict membership in one of the higher use substance groups.

Teresa: I think when we’ve had people who were more on the substance abuse research end of things come, they’ve had these same conversations with us about the fact that so many of the individuals that they’re treating for their substance use have had significant trauma histories as a part of that.

And so they’re using that either to numb or to cope with anxiety, or in some cases to deal with flashbacks or other things they’re experiencing. So in some ways, it’s a maladaptive coping behavior, but it’s a coping behavior. And I wonder if that’s really what you saw in your own data here.

Nick: For sure. It’s a coping behavior, and I think all coping behaviors, healthy or unhealthy, have a reason. They have a function. They work. Often some of the more unhealthy ones work in the short term and are not as adaptive in the long term. But I think one of the big takeaways that has emerged in my experience working with these data is that where someone ends up 10, 20, or 30 years after maltreatment, after a very difficult upbringing, is a product of thousands and thousands of small day-to-day, moment-to-moment interactions.

There’s so much that goes into it. So yes, maltreatment, abuse, neglect, those are very impactful experiences that can prompt people to look for ways to numb that pain. But there’s also the moment-to-moment interactions of the kinds of, social groups that they join, you know, once they get to middle school, high school.

You know, social groups where substance use is maybe more acceptable. You know, a lot of my research has looked at the sort of moment-to-moment interactions between children and their caregivers and understanding the bidirectional effects, where caregivers who are maybe more predisposed toward emotion dysregulation or harsh parenting, that tends to exacerbate these behavior problems, which then creates more opportunities for harsh parenting and emotion dysregulation for caregivers.

So yes, substance use definitely can be this maladaptive coping strategy, but I think there are other sociocultural elements that factor into it.

Teresa: Well, and also current adversity, right? Because you also looked at that: somebody could be facing tremendous economic pressures or a recent job loss, or something else, not from 20 years ago, but something they’re experiencing presently that can also prompt looking for a way to cope with that.

Or in the case of opioid use, so many people who had a back injury or something that started down a path that they wouldn’t have predicted would’ve wound up where it did. So I think this is really an interesting piece of literature, but as you say, it’s one piece of a longer and more nuanced discussion.

I want to go back to smokers just for a minute because I’m curious about this link you found with caregiver mental illness and what you think that’s about as you just speculate. I mean, again, this paper can’t answer every question, but is it about the fact that someone smoking in adulthood started much younger, and maybe at the time they started it tied to trying to deal with all the chaos in their home or anxiety that they were feeling about that or something else?

What do you speculate that’s about? Because it’s not an intuitive link, right?

Nick: I agree. It’s not super intuitive, and I hesitate to draw any real conclusions based on this one correlation here. But you’re right. One thing we didn’t measure was specifically caregivers’ smoking habits.

Teresa: Oh, interesting.

Nick: I also wonder—we know that smoking cigarettes, using tobacco, is linked with poor mental health.

There’s probably a bidirectional component to that as well. I’d be curious what kind of exposure these smokers had to other smokers in their lives.

I’d be curious about the stress-reduction impact that smoking had for them, at least perhaps when they first started smoking and experienced that relief, that stress reduction that nicotine can bring immediately. Of course, again, another example of how, in the short term, it works great. Long term, there are a lot of negative side effects.

Teresa: That was interesting because also, and again, one study can’t look at everything, but I also wondered to the point that you brought up earlier about their social milieu. People who have family and friends that smoke are more likely to smoke, you know, if that’s in their social circle. Also, depending on where you live, smoking is more or less prevalent.

I remember a trip not that long ago where I went to Virginia. I don’t live in Virginia; I live in DC, where very few people smoke. I went to Virginia, and it felt like every third person was smoking. So I think there’s that part of the social milieu, the social acceptability of it.

It’s intriguing to think about to what extent, especially with that one subgroup, there may be other variables significantly at play.

Nick: I think the social influences in all of this are massive. What you consider to be acceptable, what your friends and family consider to be acceptable.

Substance use is so complicated. There’s the immediate social acceptableness of it, there’s the societal acceptableness of it, there’s, you know, legal implications, and we could talk about how destructive alcohol is despite it being perfectly legal for individuals 21 and above. So yes, I think a lot of this factors into it.

I was really interested also. These data were collected back in 2012, and since 2012.

You talk about cannabis legalization and new routes of administration, vaping. I mean, that’s just exploded in the past 10 to 15 years, and I’d be very curious to see what a similar study would find these days as well.

Teresa: Yes, especially because when you look at general population data around that, it’s now so common really in the general population of places where it has been legalized in some way that it would be interesting to redo this and to see how that impacts both kids and then later when they’re older as adults.

I just want to turn to the depressant user pool because this is one where, you know, I’m not saying any other pools aren’t concerning, but this is one that’s concerning because we know so much now about opioid use and how harmful that can be, the overdose possibilities there, and everything else. And that’s certainly been well covered in not just the literature, but in the media as well.

I’m wondering about that emotional abuse correlate that you found, and how do you think about that? When we have kids coming through our CACs where that’s a prominent component of the abuse that they’ve suffered, how should we think about their vulnerability to future use, whether or not it’s opioids or other depressants? How should we think about protective factors and how we should be enhancing those?

Is there anything we should be doing differently, I guess, with kids who may have a vulnerability shaped by that?

Nick: Yeah. It’s a great question. You know, emotional abuse, in general, in the field of maltreatment, is one of those experiences that’s a little bit hard to define and has been defined in different ways.

I have a colleague who’s looking at that question specifically. How do you actually define emotional or psychological abuse? What fits into that category? Where do you define or label that threshold? So I think that’s a whole other interesting question. But like a lot of the experiences these participants have gone through, I think there’s not one experience that’s going to determine the rest of their lives.

There’s not one experience that’s going to determine even their substance use trajectories over time. I do think emotional abuse—probably the reason that emerged as one of the predictors in this case—is indicative of more enduring, day-to-day invalidation. As a clinical psychologist myself, anecdotally I’ve seen that invalidation, what some have called traumatic invalidation: constantly, day to day, not feeling validated, not feeling like your experiences and your emotions matter or make sense.

I see that as really impactful for shaping development over time, and in this case, for seeking experiences, psychological states where you do feel really good and maybe feel some of that self-love, or at least you’re not feeling the invalidation that you’ve experienced for many years.

So that’s something that comes to mind when I think of that emotional abuse and how that can impact things.

Teresa: I was just thinking as you were talking about it, that with other forms of child maltreatment, they typically end in childhood, right? So by the time you’re studying someone at age twenty-four, they’re not still being physically abused, they’re not still being sexually abused or neglected, whatever.

However, emotional abuse they still could be experiencing—not just from their childhood, but currently—because a parent who tends to be demeaning or verbally abusive with their children doesn’t always stop. Many people describe that going throughout their adulthood as well.

And so it did make me also wonder if they’re using this to cope with something they’re experiencing as an ongoing problem, you know?

Nick: Yeah. I’m sure that there’s an element of that. Yeah, and I think like a lot of these experiences, different experiences of maltreatment, whether it’s physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, what I’ve seen, both in my research and in my clinical work is, you know, a lot of these experiences are happening at a really, crucial time for identity development, for understanding who we are as people.

One of the saddest experiences I see from individuals who have gone through really difficult experiences, whether abuse or even lower-level difficult experiences, is that lowered self-esteem, that poor sense of self-worth. And when you go through life with those challenges, you’re more likely to enter into situations, whether relationships or friendships, where you’re not going to feel valued.

And so, you know, yes, these experiences, maybe they’re not happening anymore, but I just see how these things repeat themselves over time. And I think from a treatment perspective, you know, working on that sense of self, challenging those negative core beliefs about yourself, I see that as really key in preventing these cycles from continuing over time.

Teresa: Well, I think the great irony here is that depressants make you feel better initially, right? You have an altered state. Maybe you feel giddy or giggly if it’s alcohol or whatever, or something else. But it’s certainly altered. But they’re also, as the name suggests, then make you feel worse often, you know?

And so there’s also the sadness of knowing that someone is already feeling bad about themselves, potentially, and then they’re taking something that may in fact make them feel worse in the long run, aside from any health effect. It’s one of those things where your heart just goes out because no one would want that for themselves, right?

If they actually knew that what feels better in the short run is going to feel worse in the long run, in terms of what they’re doing to cope.

Nick: And even if you know that, even if you have that knowledge, it’s still hard. It’s still hard to break.

Teresa: And you may suffer from addiction. I mean, you may become addicted to these substances and then find it impossible to stop.

So I think that’s—well, not impossible, I shouldn’t say that. But without help, it can certainly feel impossible to stop. Let’s talk about the poly-users for a minute. What percentage of your sample were they? And what seemed specific to them aside from their parents or caregivers also having a history of poly-use?

Nick: Again, a fairly small proportion of the sample fit into this category. We were, just based on previous literature and, I’ll admit, preconceived notions.

I was really expecting this poly-use group, which again, these are individuals reporting use of many different substances, certainly alcohol and cannabis, but also illicit substances like cocaine and amphetamines.

I was expecting this group to be a much bigger proportion of the sample based on how high-risk the LongSCAN sample was. And we didn’t find that. It was about 4 to 5% of the sample, which I think is still clinically meaningful. We want to identify these individuals who are reporting use of lots of different substances. That was worth identifying and discussing, but still smaller than we thought.

This proportion of 4 to 5% really reflects more general-population studies. We thought it would be closer to 10 or 20%, perhaps, but it was certainly much smaller. Now, like you said, there were life experiences that tended to predict membership in this group.

Caregiver substance use, not surprisingly, was something that tended to predict membership into this group. We also looked at adolescent substance use. Not surprisingly, people who were using lots of different substances in young adulthood were also using some substances when they were 18. And then we were looking at adult experiences.

We looked at intimate partner violence as a more concurrent predictor of poly-use. These poly-users reported greater rates of several different forms of intimate partner violence. That included psychological aggression from partners, physical assault from partners, and sexual coercion from partners.

Again, these particular analyses were more exploratory, more correlational, so it’s hard to say intimate partner violence caused this kind of prolonged use of many different substances. I’m sure there’s a sort of bidirectional, consequential effect happening there, where when you’re perhaps using or in situations where people are using many different substances, there may be a greater risk for some of these events.

But there’s no doubt that to some extent, to some degree, this intimate partner violence is a causal factor for substance use later on.

Teresa: Well, what’s interesting to me about it is it seems that here you have this group of individuals who has experienced all of these ACEs in childhood, and then sadly, in adulthood, they’re experiencing a whole additional set of adversities, right?

Abuse, et cetera. And if I’m remembering right from the literature, in addition, they were more likely to meet the criteria for alcohol use disorder. But their life trajectory for this 5% is that they’re continuing to experience an extension of much of what they experienced in childhood.

And I think that’s just, it’s tragic, and it made me immediately think about what can we do for this 5%?

Nick: Yeah, agreed. I mean, that’s one of the hardest things about this research is digging into the individuals that are most affected by this. I think a big takeaway of this paper, but also my, you know, my research more broadly, definitely is resilience.

You know, kids are resilient. There are a lot of experiences that kids and teens can bounce back from with the right supports. I think with this group that we’re identifying, the smaller percentage, the smaller proportion of individuals that really continue to struggle over time, I think largely the issue is that these are the individuals who never had the chance to bounce back in many ways.

They never had the supports to bounce back. They never had maybe that one positive adult in their lives. And so we’re seeing prolonged, more entrenched patterns over time. I think the same concept applies to the fact that, as a lot of us know by this point, most kids who were abused or neglected do not go on to abuse or neglect their own kids.

So there’s a lot of resilience there. But yes, I think we have to recognize that smaller proportion of individuals who still struggle over time.

Teresa: Well, I’m glad we ordered these conversations in the way we did, because I’m interviewing Sheri Hanvey next about her new book coming out on resilience, and, and she’s a renowned researcher in that area.

And I was thinking about that even as you were talking, that the amazing thing is that such a large proportion of the individuals you studied have gone about their lives, and at age 24 are doing well, thank goodness. But then here we see that if you don’t have adequate support from your family, from your community, and other things, it’s a much harder path.

And we see this, you know, result of this in the poly-user sample. You’re a clinical psychologist, and so what do you see as the implications from this research for other child abuse professionals, whether they’re clinical psychologists or they encounter families as victim advocates or in other kinds of ways.

How should this inform the way we’re working with families?

Nick: Yeah. I think it has to be a multi-pronged approach. I think it all starts with the caregivers, you know, getting caregivers involved in treatment as early as possible. You’re just going to get the most bang for your buck there. I am certified in parent-child interaction therapy- Hmm.

PCIT is a very cool and unique approach to treatment that involves live coaching of parents and their three- to seven-year-old children who may be struggling with behavior problems. Often parents are coming into this treatment with parenting styles that aren’t the most adaptive, maybe harsher parenting.

And I think about that, you know, training and coaching parents to use more positive strategies, more consistency early on, I see that as just huge. Now, you don’t always have the opportunity to do that, but you might not be seeing individuals until they’re out of the house, until they’re older. You know, you can’t coach their parents to redo their whole parenting approach.

The other thing that comes to mind is really approaching this from all angles. I think often what we saw in our research more broadly is that it’s not one experience that determines their trajectory. It’s a lot of little experiences and a handful of really big-T traumas that over the course of their lives steered them toward different environments, different socioeconomic environments, and removed opportunities that other kids would have had.

And so I think surrounding these individuals with different types of supports, job supports, economic supports, of course, doing the hard psychological work that needs to be done so that these individuals can see themselves as capable and, you know, confident individuals that can go into the world and be successful.

I think it takes all of that, and the earlier we can do it, the more we can get caregivers involved and give caregivers better tools for dealing with what might be difficult children sometimes. I think I see that as just so crucial.

Teresa: I was so glad to hear you talk about PCIT, because I remember when I first got exposed to that and actually saw an example of one of the sessions, I was just like, “This is just brilliant.”.

And I know it’s a rare modality out in the world, but a really important one for families who often a parent has not had good parenting themselves, right? And so they honestly don’t know what it looks like. And so I think that coaching is so critical because it’s happening in the moment. It’s not like, “Here’s your homework.

Go home, and hopefully you get that right.” But the fact that you’re doing it as it’s happening, I think, is just an interesting thing. Maybe we’ll get somebody on the podcast to come in and really talk about it.

Nick: I think you should. It’s pretty interesting. PCIT is a really incredible treatment.

Teresa: Yeah. But I was also thinking as you were talking about the fact that when we’re screening these cases and talking to families, we often don’t really talk to the caregivers much about their own substance use and any assistance they may need with that, because maybe they’ve been using this as a way of coping with domestic violence that they faced or other kinds of things.

And there’s a point of intervention that can have a long-term impact for kids, if that’s something that they’re open to. and I think the kids themselves, like we’re very focused often in our world on child sexual abuse, right? So any physical abuse and other things. But we’re very focused on that, as you’re calling it, big T trauma.

But are we asking the tweens and teens about their own substance use? And pursuing that if they are talking about it, because that may be a point of intervention that has more potency, honestly, early on than some of the other things, and may affect how well they have uptake of other treatment that we’re offering and those kinds of things.

So I’m just interested in your ideas about that, because I think this is the struggle, you know, when there are limited resources. It’s like, what to pursue first, what to pursue concurrently. Like, how do you think about that in your own practice?

Nick: Yeah, it’s really another million-dollar question.

What do you focus on? What’s the best thing to target when resources are limited, which is the reality? Screening for substance use—doing this research has really made me realize how important it is to be asking regularly, nonjudgmentally, fairly early on.

I think about even 10, 11, 12 years old onward, talking about that openly, not skipping some of the less common substances. Something that emerged in our sample was a pretty high rate of hallucinogens and ecstasy in the poly-use subsample, the poly-use profile.

While they had higher rates of lots of different substances, hallucinogens and ecstasy were really high for this group.

I think it was a unique finding. So being familiar, first of all, with these different substances as a provider strikes me as important. You talked about understanding parents’ and caregivers’ use of substances.

I see that as pretty important as well, understanding what are kids seeing day to day around the house, what’s considered normal, even if we’re not talking about big T trauma, we’re not talking about major abusive events. What are parents like when they’re maybe under the influence? How does that impact children?

Part of this follow-up study, which was not included in this paper, was qualitative transcripts. A subset of these participants, these young adults, were interviewed in very in-depth interviews to get at what the impactful experiences in their lives were, both negative and positive.

And caregiver substance use came up in at least a couple of those interviews. Participants described how, even when nothing bad happened while Mom or Dad was under the influence, it was hard knowing that they were different. They felt different. Things didn’t feel quite the same when their parents were under the influence.

Teresa: Or they might’ve just been unavailable, right?

Nick: Totally.

Teresa: So interesting. Well, I think you’ve pointed us to some very interesting avenues to explore. I’m wondering what’s next for you research-wise. Is it this sort of follow-on, a follow-on publication related to those interviews, or something else?

Nick: The last two years for me have been much more clinical than research-focused.

I’ve just recently finished my PhD in clinical psychology, and.

Teresa: Congratulations.

Nick: Thank you. The last year of that is a fully clinical internship to get your hours in.

Yes, to get hours up. I also did a clinical postdoc where I specialized in PCIT, among other things.

And so I’ve been more in the clinical world than the research world. I think the next few years are a little bit up in the air, sort of to be determined, where my focus goes. I would love to continue to be involved in the LongSCAN study.

Recently, part of my graduate school training was collecting data from the third generation.

We were bringing in second-generation parents who had young kids of their own at this point, and we were starting to look at some biological indicators, trying to understand how and why harsh parenting, abuse, and neglect get transmitted across generations.

Can we put second-generation parents with their third-generation children in a kind of stressful task, measuring their heart rate variability and skin conductance?

Do these biomarkers predict later harsh parenting, or just different parenting styles and profiles? So I think continuing to be involved in the LongSCAN study would be a big goal for me, because it’s really one of the most unique and long-standing studies of child abuse and neglect that we have.

Teresa: That’s fascinating. Yeah, absolutely. Well, what other questions should I have asked you and didn’t? Or was there anything else you wanted to make sure we talked about today?

Nick: You know, I’ve mentioned this a few times, but I always like to return back to this. You know, in my research, the effect sizes for any one experience is never that big.

It’s really the accumulation of many different experiences over an individual’s lifetime. And I think in some ways that’s daunting, but in some ways that’s really encouraging because I do think there are lots of opportunities to break these negative cycles that we see. It doesn’t take too much.

Kids are very resilient. They need the resources, they need the opportunities to show their resilience, but they are resilient, and that’s something I’ll always keep coming back to.

Teresa: You know, I found your study in the end, even though it might, the title might not tend to make you think this, you know, very hopeful for these kids and very hopeful as they become adults for all the reasons that you’re saying.

So thank you so much for being so invested in finding out more about that, and I know we’ll all benefit from it. And come back anytime. Thank you, Nick.

Nick: I really appreciate you having me. Thanks so much.

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