Gene-Environment Pathways to Cognitive Intelligence and Psychotic-Like Experiences in Children

Abstract

Identifying the social and biological mechanisms of cognitive and psychological development of children is essential for optimizing preventive and educational efforts. However, the causal pathways by which genetic and environmental factors affect cognitive and psychiatric outcomes remain unknown, especially in early childhood. We examined the causal relationships among genes, the environment, intelligence, and psychotic-like experiences in 7,632 multiethnic (5,905 with European ancestry) children aged 9-10 years old from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. Using up-to-date computational causal analysis and rigorous path modeling, we found a significant causal influence of residential, family, and school environments and genome-wide polygenic scores of cognitive capacities on preadolescents' psychotic-like experiences mediated by intelligence. Mitigation of good parenting behavior and positive school environments on psychotic-like experiences dominated the pernicious effects of genetic and residential adversities. Our findings support that intelligence may be a biological resilience factor for psychosis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to identify casual trajectories of neurocognitive development in early childhood and the first to provide empirical evidence that positive parenting behavior and school environment can impose a considerable degree of causal impact on children's cognitive and psychiatric outcomes. We suggest the implementation of socioeconomic policies to improve family and school environments and promote local economic development to enhance children's cognitive ability and mental health.

Individual Differences in the Effects of Neighborhood Socioeconomic Deprivation on Economic Decision Making and Psychotic Risk in Children

“…We found that with the presence of residential disadvantage, children more vulnerable to having PLEs when exposed to neighborhood deprivation had lower GPS of cognitive performance and IQ, and higher educational attainment GPS. At first, this finding may seem incongruous with prior reports indicating a negative association between PLEs and educational attainment GPS (28,78,79).…”

“…It is plausible that the (heterogeneous) effects of early residential adversity on psychiatric disorders other than prodromal psychosis may not become apparent until later adolescence. Lastly, future research should examine the heterogeneous effects of additional environmental risk factors, such as parenting behavior (28) and early life stress (84), to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the environmental influences on psychopathology.. This study highlights the differential effects of neighborhood disadvantage on intertemporal economic decisions and psychotic risk during early childhood.…”

“…Our ability to identify the heterogeneous negative impact of neighborhood deprivation on childhood psychopathology was facilitated by our innovative utilization of recent rigorous causal machine learning modeling techniques. Using the IV Forest method, we found evidence that residential deprivation may exert differential effects on children's risk of psychosis, contingent upon a variety of genetic factors (e.g., GPS of cognitive performance, educational attainment, and IQ (28,49,78,79)) and environmental risk factors (e.g., family income (3,45)) previously identified in the literature. Our results were adjusted for potential biases from observed and unobserved variables.…”

“…We hypothesized that childhood adversity causes impairment in one's valuation system, leading to negative life outcomes. Children who experienced social adversities such as poverty show steeper discounting of future rewards in adulthood and have greater risk of psychosis (2,3,(26)(27)(28).…”

“…Additionally, this study aimed to investigate the impact of such deprivation on adolescents' psychotic-like experiences (PLEs). Exposure to adversities at the neighborhood level during childhood has been shown to negatively influence neurocognitive development, subsequently resulting in psychiatric disorders and unfavorable social outcomes, such as decreased income, reduced probability of college attendance, and limited employment opportunities (3,7,17,28,(42)(43)(44)(45). This phenomenon is particularly pronounced in societies where discrimination based on family income or race/ethnicity restricts underprivileged families from selecting neighborhoods that present greater opportunities for upward social mobility, as observed in the United States (17).…”