Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and emotion dysregulation phenotypes: An intersectional analysis of race/ethnicity and gender in a nationally representative U.S. sample

Background

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are strong, preventable risk factors for emotion dysregulation in adolescence, but whether ACEs-emotion dysregulation associations differ by race/ethnicity or gender remains unclear.

Objective

We examined (a) how race/ethnicity and gender jointly impact latent ACEs classes and emotion dysregulation phenotypes, and (b) how these ACEs classes in childhood (by age 9) transition to latent emotion dysregulation phenotypes in adolescence (at age 15).

Participants and setting

Participants were 3,273 children from two waves of data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a large, nationally representative cohort. The sample consisted of 26.6% non-Hispanic (NH) Black boys, 25.4% NH Black girls, 12.9% Hispanic boys, 12.6% Hispanic girls, 11.8% NH White boys, and 10.7% NH White girls.

Method

We estimated latent class models to identify ACEs patterns across ten indicators and dysregulation phenotypes across affective, attentional, and behavioral domains. Latent transition analysis was used to examine how ACEs classes transitioned into dysregulation phenotypes from childhood into adolescence.

Results

The findings revealed significant variation in the number and nature of latent classes of both ACEs and emotion dysregulation across the intersection of race/ethnicity and gender. NH Black and Hispanic children were more likely to be in the Poverty and Parental Separation class than NH White children. Hispanic boys had the highest prevalence of Severe Dysregulation (16%), whereas NH White boys had the highest prevalence of Low Symptoms (52%). Individuals in the Poverty and Parental Separation class had a higher probability of transitioning to the Low Symptoms class. In contrast, those in the Abuse and Family Dysfunction class were more likely to transition to the Severe Dysregulation class, with NH White girls showing the highest probability (.34), nearly twice that of NH Black girls (.19). These gender differences in these transition probabilities were observed for Whites but not Blacks.

Conclusions

These findings thus highlight the need for adopting an intersectional, person-centered approach when studying the effects of ACEs on adolescent development.