Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs): A Developmental-Psychopathology Perspective

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have become a hot topic in child and adolescent mental health, as reflected in recent policy shifts toward trauma-informed care in clinical psychology and psychiatry worldwide. Indeed, ACEs are now recognized as major contributors to child psychopathology, and are recognised in most, if not all, etiological models of mental disorders in children. The ACEs ‘movement’ has nonetheless been the subject of controversy, with concerns raised over the potential misuse of the widely-used ‘ACE score’, and perceptions that research in some areas (e.g., stress generation and the familial transmission of ACEs), may even be child or parent blaming. Moreover, research based on the construct of ACEs has often lacked the developmental perspective needed to inform early intervention and prevention practices.

This special issue examines the emerging developmental science of ACEs and child mental health, guided by the overarching aim of bridging and integrating research on ACEs and overlapping fields (e.g., child maltreatment; stressful life events). Theoretical advances (e.g., stress sensitization; dimensional models; differential susceptibility), and methodological innovations (e.g., neuroimaging; inflammation, polygenic risk scores; analysis of person-centred trajectories), and the open science movement (e.g., unprecedented access to population-based longitudinal datasets following children from birth into adulthood), have all combined to fuel giant leaps towards a truly developmental psychopathology perspective on ACEs and child psychopathology. The papers in this special collection showcase the latest progress on this critically important topic, and the state-of-the-art developmental science that is available to inform future work.