Childhood adversities and mental health outcomes: Does the perception or age of the event matter?

The current study extends knowledge regarding the individual contribution of different adverse experiences to mental health symptoms in late adolescence by including the perception of how upsetting each experience was to the adolescent and the age at the first occurrence. We also sought to move beyond sum scores of adverse experiences by using a person-centered approach to classifying individuals with similar co-occurrence of adversities. The data came from a longitudinal study of maltreatment on adolescent development (N = 454). Self-reported childhood adversities were assessed at Wave 4 (average of 7 years postbaseline) and examined with respect to current mental health symptoms (depression, PTSD, anxiety, and externalizing). Although the adversity sum score was a potent predictor of all mental health outcomes, the results indicated that the use of a sum score obscures information about the importance of individual adversities. Additionally, the influence of age of occurrence varied based on the adversity and outcome, while the perception of the event did not add much unique variance. Finally, the latent class analyses provided unique information about the patterns of co-occurring adversity in this sample, and that membership in either of the multiple-adversity classes was associated with more mental health symptoms.