Associations between early life adversity and executive function in children adopted internationally from orphanages

Camelia E. Hostinar, Sarah A. Stellern, Catherine Schaefer, Stephanie M. Carlson, and Megan R. Gunnar
PNAS October 16, 2012 109 (Supplement 2) 17208-17212; first published October 9, 2012 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1121246109

  1. Edited by Gene E. Robinson, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, IL, and approved May 14, 2012 (received for review February 14, 2012)

Abstract

Executive function (EF) abilities are increasingly recognized as an important protective factor for children experiencing adversity, promoting better stress and emotion regulation as well as social and academic adjustment. We provide evidence that early life adversity is associated with significant reductions in EF performance on a developmentally sensitive battery of laboratory EF tasks that measured cognitive flexibility, working memory, and inhibitory control. Animal models also suggest that early adversity has a negative impact on the development of prefrontal cortex-based cognitive functions. In this study, we report EF performance 1 y after adoption in 2.5- to 4-y-old children who had experienced institutional care in orphanages overseas compared with a group of age-matched nonadopted children. To our knowledge, this is the youngest age and the soonest after adoption that reduced EF performance has been shown using laboratory measures in this population. EF reductions in performance were significant above and beyond differences in intelligence quotient. Within the adopted sample, current EF was associated with measures of early deprivation after controlling for intelligence quotient, with less time spent in the birth family before placement in an institution and lower quality of physical/social care in institutions predicting poorer performance on the EF battery.

Footnotes

  • ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: hosti002{at}umn.edu.

  • Author contributions: S.M.C. and M.R.G. designed research; C.E.H. and S.A.S. performed research; C.S. contributed to data collection; C.E.H. analyzed data; and C.E.H., S.A.S., C.S., S.M.C., and M.R.G. wrote the paper.

  • The authors declare no conflict of interest.

  • This paper results from the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences, “Biological Embedding of Early Social Adversity: From Fruit Flies to Kindergartners,” held December 9–10, 2011, at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering in Irvine, CA. The complete program and audio files of most presentations are available on the NAS Web site at www.nasonline.org/biological-embedding.

  • This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.

  • This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1121246109/-/DCSupplemental.

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EF in postinstitutionalized children
Camelia E. Hostinar, Sarah A. Stellern, Catherine Schaefer, Stephanie M. Carlson, Megan R. Gunnar
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Oct 2012, 109 (Supplement 2) 17208-17212; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1121246109
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