Background: Although childhood adversity has a lasting negative effect on individuals' well-being, children with high psychological resilience can buffer against these negative impacts. However, the brain mechanism underlying the protective role of psychological resilience remained unknown, especially concerning different adversity dimensions. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate how psychological resilience shielded children's brain network connectivity against different dimensions of adversity (e.g. abuse and neglect) and evaluated the immediate and long-term benefits of this protection on mental and physical health.
Methods: Childhood adversity history, and psychological resilience with functional MRI scanning were obtained from 94 China rural children aged between 10 and 14 years old at baseline. Moreover, baseline and six months later somatization symptoms, depression, and anxiety were collected.
Results: The results showed that psychological resilience buffered the effect of childhood abuse, but not neglect, on resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC). Specifically, children with low psychological resilience had increased limbic-somatomotor network (LN-SMN) and limbic-ventral attention network (LN-VAN) connectivity after abuse. In contrast, this association was absent in individuals with higher psychological resilience. Furthermore, among children with lower psychological resilience, childhood abuse was linked to severe concurrent somatization and depressive symptoms through heightened LN-SMN connectivity and to severe six-month-later anxiety via both heightened LN-SMN and LN-VAN connectivity.
Conclusion: The results identified the specific protective effect of psychological resilience against the neurotoxic effects of childhood abuse but not neglect, involving emotion regulation, salience processing, and somatomotor networks. These findings highlight that individualized interventions should be provided to children facing different adversities.