Developmental Stage Differences in the Childhood Trauma-Adolescent Anxiety Network: A Large-Scale Cross-Sectional Application of Network Temperature.

Abstract

Childhood trauma is strongly associated with anxiety in adolescents. Network temperature, a metric recently proposed for quantifying the dynamic stability of psychopathological networks, provides a novel analytical framework; higher temperature indicates greater network instability. This study extends network temperature for the first time to a trauma-anxiety network, examining developmental stage differences (early, middle, and late adolescence) in the childhood trauma-anxiety relationship using a large-scale cross-sectional sample. The analytical sample comprised 28,482 Chinese adolescents (50.3% female; aged 10-19 years, M = 12.85 years, SD = 1.99) from a cross-sectional survey. Using the Ising model based on network analysis, we constructed a network linking childhood trauma and adolescent anxiety, and computed its network temperature across developmental stages, with separate analyses conducted for males and females. Results identified physical abuse as the most globally central node and emotional abuse as the most critical bridging node connecting the trauma and anxiety clusters. Overall network temperature peaked in middle adolescence and declined thereafter. Distinct sex-specific patterns emerged: females exhibited a continued increase in network temperature after middle adolescence, whereas males showed a pronounced decline. These findings highlight the value of network temperature as a system-level metric for characterizing the stability of trauma-anxiety networks and underscore the importance of adopting developmentally and sex-sensitive perspectives in understanding this relationship.