Violence Exposure and Adolescents’ Autonomic Regulation
Interpersonal violence exposure is associated with adolescent maladjustment across the domains of mental health (e.g., traumatic stress), interpersonal functioning (e.g., conflictual relationships, dating violence, sexual risk behavior), and health risk behaviors (e.g., substance use, sexual risk). Substantial variability in the responses of adolescents presents a need to identify mechanisms that explain how and why interpersonal violence exposure leads to adjustment problems. Violence exposure is believed to alter autonomic nervous system (ANS) regulation in ways that contribute to functional impairments in cognition, emotion, and behavior. Alterations in ANS development following violence exposure may prime adolescents to perceive the social environment as threatening and promote maladaptive patterns of threat-related responses to non-violent stressors. Preliminary data from a short-term longitudinal study of adolescent girls with a history of interpersonal violence (IPV) exposure demonstrates that measures of autonomic cardiac control are related to violence exposure. I will also describe how utilizing a virtual reality paradigm can provide an ecologically valid framework for studying individual differences in adolescents’ stress regulation and associations with violence-related sequelae.