Neuroticism and Childhood Adversity: Associations, Limits, and Causality
Updated: Oct 8
Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: September 30, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Childhood adversity is reliably associated with higher neuroticism in adulthood, but that finding is not equivalent to saying that adversity single-handedly causes a person’s adult personality. Neuroticism is a dimensional personality trait, childhood adversity is a broad family of exposures, and the research linking them combines retrospective reports, prospective records, longitudinal cohorts, genetically informed designs, and meta-analyses. The strongest conclusion is therefore layered: the association is robust at the population level, plausible developmental pathways exist, and causal attribution remains more complicated than a simple trauma-causes-neuroticism story.
The most comprehensive evidence currently available is a 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis of 136 studies involving 526,371 participants. It found a positive association between childhood trauma and adult neuroticism, with an overall standardized effect of g = 0.46. The strength varied by trauma subtype rather than behaving like one uniform effect; see Rosenek and colleagues’ 2026 meta-analysis. A separate preregistered meta-analytic synthesis of adverse childhood experiences and nonclinical personality traits likewise found the strongest Big Five-related association for the emotional stability/neuroticism dimension; see Credé and colleagues’ meta-analysis.
Those results matter, but they still do not let us infer an individual history from an adult personality score. A person can have high neuroticism without childhood adversity, and a person can experience severe childhood adversity without developing high neuroticism. The same adult trait level can emerge through many developmental pathways.
The Short Answer
Research supports a meaningful association between childhood adversity and higher adult neuroticism. In the 2026 meta-analysis, emotional neglect showed the largest subtype association with adult neuroticism (g = 0.40), followed by emotional abuse (g = 0.33). Smaller positive associations were reported for sexual abuse (g = 0.22), victimization (g = 0.21), physical abuse (g = 0.18), physical neglect (g = 0.15), and unspecified abuse (g = 0.13); unspecified neglect was not significantly associated in that analysis.
The causal interpretation is narrower than the association. Longitudinal, sibling-comparison, and genetic studies strengthen the case that early environments can matter for later personality, yet they also show why shared family influences, inherited liability, child temperament, later experiences, measurement method, and recall processes have to be considered. Childhood adversity is one developmental influence among many, not a personality diagnosis and not an all-purpose explanation for emotional sensitivity in adulthood.
What Neuroticism Means Here
In modern personality science, neuroticism is a broad dimension describing individual differences in the tendency to experience negative emotion and psychological distress across time and situations. It is one of the Big Five domains. It overlaps conceptually with negative emotionality, but terminology and facet structure depend on the model and instrument. It is also the inverse pole of emotional stability in many Big Five measures. For the construct itself, see Neuroticism: What It Is in the Big Five Personality Model.
Neuroticism is not the same thing as negative affect at a particular moment. Negative affect is a state or a narrower affective construct; neuroticism summarizes a relatively enduring pattern. It is not the same as anxiety, because anxiety can refer to a temporary state, a symptom, a trait-anxiety construct, or a clinical disorder. It is not a screening result and it is not a psychiatric diagnosis. A high neuroticism score says something about a personality dimension on a specified measure; it does not diagnose trauma, PTSD, depression, generalized anxiety disorder, OCD, or any other condition.
What Counts as Childhood Adversity?
Childhood adversity is an umbrella term rather than one single exposure. Depending on the study, it can include emotional, physical, or sexual abuse; emotional or physical neglect; exposure to family violence; parental mental illness or substance problems; parental loss or separation; severe family conflict; economic hardship; peer victimization; institutional deprivation; or cumulative adverse childhood experiences. Different studies include different combinations.
The word trauma is often used more narrowly than adversity. A childhood experience can be developmentally adverse without meeting a formal trauma-exposure definition used in trauma-related diagnostic frameworks. Conversely, severe abuse and violence can clearly qualify as traumatic exposure. This article follows the terminology of each study rather than treating adversity, maltreatment, abuse, neglect, and trauma as interchangeable.
This distinction is important because effect sizes differ by exposure type, severity, chronicity, timing, measurement source, and social context. A cumulative ACE count can be useful for population research, but it gives equal numerical weight to experiences that may differ greatly in developmental meaning. A maltreatment questionnaire captures something different from contemporaneous child-protection records or repeated prospective interviews.
How Strong Is the Association?
The 2026 meta-analysis provides the clearest current summary. Across 136 eligible studies, childhood trauma was associated with higher adult neuroticism at g = 0.46. That is an aggregate population-level effect, not the probability that any particular exposed child will later score high on neuroticism. The analysis also found substantial variation across trauma subtypes, reinforcing the point that childhood adversity should not be treated as a single homogeneous exposure; see the Clinical Psychology Review synthesis.
Earlier work points in the same direction. In a population-based community sample of roughly 1,170 adults, Hengartner and colleagues found neuroticism associated with multiple forms of reported childhood maltreatment; when the overlap among maltreatment types was modeled, emotional abuse showed the most prominent independent association with neuroticism. The total variance explained was modest, which is precisely what a multifactorial developmental model predicts; see Hengartner et al..
An Australian community study of 7,485 adults also reported higher neuroticism among people recalling more childhood adversity. That study used the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire together with several other affective and behavioral measures, which matters because its neuroticism scale is not interchangeable with a NEO, BFI-2, or IPIP score; see Rosenman and Rodgers.
Across studies, the pattern is consistent enough to regard the association as established. The exact magnitude, however, is not a universal constant. Samples differ by age, country, sex composition, clinical status, socioeconomic conditions, adversity definition, neuroticism instrument, and whether exposure was reported prospectively or retrospectively.
Which Forms of Adversity Show the Strongest Associations?
In the 2026 synthesis, emotional neglect had the largest subtype association with adult neuroticism, followed by emotional abuse. That does not mean emotional neglect is always the most damaging adversity for every outcome, nor that a ranking from one meta-analysis should be converted into a hierarchy of personal suffering. It means that, across the studies included in that analysis, those exposure categories showed the largest standardized associations with the adult neuroticism measures used.
One plausible reason is that chronic emotional environments can repeatedly shape expectations about safety, support, rejection, and the predictability of care. Another is methodological: emotional neglect and emotional abuse are frequently measured by retrospective self-report, and both personality and current mental state can influence how people interpret and report past relational experiences. The observed association can therefore contain both developmental signal and measurement-related covariance.
The subtype differences also argue against a binary model in which a person is simply exposed or unexposed. Duration, developmental timing, relationship to the perpetrator, available support, co-occurring adversities, and the child’s own temperament can all change the meaning of the same broad category.
Does Childhood Adversity Cause Neuroticism?
The evidence is compatible with a causal contribution from adverse early environments, but it does not establish a simple one-directional causal chain in which childhood adversity is sufficient or necessary for high adult neuroticism. Most of the literature is observational, and the strongest observational designs reduce some alternative explanations rather than eliminating all of them.
Temporal Ordering Helps, but It Is Not Enough
If adversity is measured in childhood and neuroticism years later, the exposure clearly precedes the adult outcome. That is stronger evidence than asking adults about both childhood and personality at the same visit. Yet temporal order alone does not remove confounding. Family instability, parental personality, socioeconomic conditions, inherited dispositions, prenatal factors, and child temperament can influence both the likelihood of adversity and later personality.
Sibling Comparisons Reduce Shared-Family Confounding
A particularly informative study used the U.S. National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and compared siblings. Fletcher and Schurer found that associations between maltreatment and adult personality were smaller after controlling for family fixed effects. For neuroticism, the association was reduced by more than one third to about 0.09 standard deviations, while remaining statistically detectable in their models. The authors explicitly cautioned that the sibling fixed-effects results still did not warrant a definitive causal interpretation; see Fletcher and Schurer.
That reduction is important. It suggests that part of the ordinary association between childhood adversity and adult neuroticism reflects influences shared by siblings, while some within-family association may remain. Sibling designs themselves also have limitations: siblings can experience substantially different environments, retrospective measures can still be imperfect, and nonshared confounding is not removed.
Later Experiences Can Carry the Association Forward
Early adversity often predicts later stress exposure, and adult stress can itself relate to personality expression and change. In analyses of the Health and Retirement Study and MIDUS, Luo, Zhang, and Roberts found that retrospectively reported early adversity was associated with higher adult neuroticism and with adult stress experiences. Their results were more consistent with a linear sensitization pattern than with a simple stress-inoculation account; see Luo, Zhang, and Roberts.
This creates a developmental chain rather than a single event-to-trait jump. Early adversity may alter environments, relationships, coping opportunities, expectations, and stress exposure over time. At the same time, personality influences how people select, evoke, interpret, and respond to later environments. Development is reciprocal.
Genetics, Temperament, and Childhood Environment Are Intertwined
Neuroticism is heritable at the population level and highly polygenic. Heritability does not mean that a percentage of one person’s neuroticism is genetically fixed, and it does not imply that adversity is genetically caused. It means that, within a particular population and environment, genetic differences contribute to observed differences in the trait.
Genetically informed studies complicate any clean separation between nature and nurture. A 2023 study by Klingenberg and colleagues examined polygenic risk for neuroticism alongside childhood adversity, bullying, and parental bonding in a young twin cohort. Polygenic risk and environmental variables each related to neuroticism, but the study did not find evidence for the tested gene-by-environment interactions or gene-environment correlations in that cohort; see Klingenberg et al..
Other samples have produced different interaction patterns. In reared-apart and reared-together twins, Lehto and colleagues found that a polygenic score for neuroticism explained a small portion of variance and that some associations with emotional-health outcomes varied by childhood adversity; see Lehto et al.. The inconsistency is itself informative: gene-by-environment interaction is not a settled universal rule for neuroticism.
Gene-environment correlation is another possibility. A large study of women found that polygenic risk for several psychiatric traits, including neuroticism, was associated with reports of some forms of childhood abuse; see Ratanatharathorn and colleagues. Such findings do not mean that children cause abuse. They indicate that inherited characteristics can be statistically entangled with family and social environments through pathways that include parental traits, family structure, evocative processes, and reporting. Genetic association therefore makes causal interpretation more complex, not more deterministic.
The practical conclusion is that there is no single “neuroticism gene” and no genetic test that can determine whether an individual’s neuroticism came from adversity. Polygenic scores are research tools with small-to-modest predictive value at the group level, sensitive to ancestry and study design.
Can Neuroticism Influence How Childhood Adversity Is Remembered or Reported?
Yes, modestly, and this is one of the most important limits on retrospective research. Memory for childhood experiences is not a camera recording. Retrospective reports can contain genuine information about past adversity while also being shaped by current mood, personality, interpretation, and the availability of records or corroboration.
A 2019 systematic review and meta-analysis found low agreement between prospective and retrospective measures of childhood maltreatment. Across 16 studies and 25,471 participants, agreement was poor (Cohen’s κ = 0.19), and the two methods identified substantially different groups of people; see Baldwin and colleagues. A 2024 meta-analysis further showed that prospective and retrospective maltreatment measures differ in the strength of their associations with psychopathology; see Baldwin, Coleman, Francis, and Danese.
The Dunedin longitudinal study offers a particularly relevant example. Reuben and colleagues compared adversity recorded prospectively throughout childhood with adversity recalled at age 38. Agreement was moderate rather than perfect. People who retrospectively recalled more adverse experiences than had been prospectively recorded were, on average, somewhat more neurotic, while retrospective ACEs were more strongly associated than prospective ACEs with subjectively assessed adult outcomes. The authors emphasized that the personality effects on recall were extremely modest and required further study; see Reuben et al..
This finding should not be weaponized to dismiss a person’s account of childhood adversity. Prospective records can miss private or unreported abuse and neglect; retrospective reports can capture events that institutions never observed. The methodological lesson is narrower: when the predictor and outcome are both self-reported in adulthood, shared reporting processes can inflate or reshape correlations. Strong causal claims should therefore draw on multiple methods whenever possible.
Plausible Developmental Mechanisms
A statistical association becomes scientifically useful when researchers can test pathways that connect early experience with later patterns. Several mechanisms are plausible and partially supported, but none is a unique biomarker or a complete explanation for neuroticism.
Stress Appraisal and Threat Sensitivity
Children exposed to unpredictable, threatening, or chronically unsupportive environments may learn to monitor danger closely and prepare for rapid changes. In some contexts, heightened vigilance is adaptive. Across development, however, a lower threshold for perceiving threat or loss can contribute to more frequent negative emotional responses. That pattern overlaps conceptually with neuroticism but is not identical to it.
Emotion Regulation and Recovery
Adversity can limit opportunities to learn reliable co-regulation, emotional labeling, reappraisal, and safe recovery after stress. Later difficulty returning to baseline may contribute to the stress-reactivity profile often associated with higher neuroticism. Again, this is a probabilistic pathway. Many adversity-exposed children develop effective regulation skills, especially when supportive relationships and stable environments are available.
Self-Beliefs and Interpersonal Expectations
Repeated rejection, humiliation, neglect, or inconsistent care can shape beliefs about the self and other people. Expectations of criticism, abandonment, unpredictability, or personal inadequacy may increase self-consciousness, worry, interpersonal vigilance, and sensitivity to loss. These processes can resemble facets contained within some neuroticism models, but they are also studied independently in attachment, cognitive, and trauma research.
Biological Stress Systems
Early-life stress research documents associations with multiple biological systems, including stress-regulation, immune, autonomic, metabolic, and neural processes. A 2026 Annual Review of Psychology synthesis emphasizes sensitive periods, mediators, moderators, and wide heterogeneity in biological and behavioral outcomes rather than one universal adversity signature; see Bush, Sullivan, and Noroña-Zhou.
This is why cortisol, brain imaging, epigenetic findings, or autonomic measures should not be presented as tests for trauma-caused neuroticism. They are group-level research correlates, often sensitive to timing, context, current stress, medication, sleep, health, and measurement protocol. No validated brain scan, cortisol cutoff, or epigenetic profile can tell an individual that childhood adversity caused their neuroticism.
Development Is Not a One-Way Street
Personality develops through transactions between the child and the environment. Temperamental negative emotionality can be detectable early, before adult Big Five traits are measured in their mature form. Children differ in fearfulness, irritability, sensitivity, approach, self-regulation, and stress reactivity. These early differences can influence how caregivers respond, which situations children encounter, and how experiences are interpreted.
At the same time, caregiving quality, peer relationships, chronic stress, maltreatment, family instability, schooling, culture, health, and later life events can shape developmental trajectories. The adult trait called neuroticism is therefore the outcome of continuing development rather than the preserved imprint of a single childhood variable.
This reciprocal view also explains why adversity does not produce one personality outcome. Two children exposed to similar events can diverge because they differ in temperament, genetic liability, timing of exposure, supportive relationships, meaning-making, socioeconomic resources, subsequent experiences, and chance. Resilience is not the absence of biological or emotional response; it is one possible developmental trajectory among many.
Measurement Changes the Answer
“Neuroticism and childhood adversity” can look like one research question, but the result depends heavily on how both sides are measured.
Adversity Measures
Some studies use simple ACE counts. Others use specific maltreatment subscales, such as emotional abuse, emotional neglect, physical abuse, physical neglect, or sexual abuse. Others use interviews, administrative records, repeated prospective assessments, or composite indices. A score of four ACEs in one study is not necessarily equivalent to four exposures in another because the item sets, time windows, severity thresholds, and sampling frames can differ.
Neuroticism Measures
Neuroticism is also operationalized differently. The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire measures neuroticism within the PEN tradition. NEO inventories measure a Five-Factor Model Neuroticism domain with specific facets. The BFI-2 uses the label Negative Emotionality and organizes it into anxiety, depression, and emotional volatility facets. IPIP measures can reproduce different public-domain operationalizations. Scores across these instruments are correlated but not interchangeable.
For that reason, a “high neuroticism score” has no universal raw cutoff. Interpretation requires the instrument, form, scoring direction, normative or comparison sample, age and population context, and whether the reported value is a raw score, standardized score, T-score, percentile, or sample-specific category. The same caution applies when a childhood-adversity study labels participants “high” or “low” in neuroticism.
Childhood Adversity, Neuroticism, and Mental Health
Childhood adversity and higher neuroticism are each associated with elevated risk for multiple mental-health problems at the population level. That overlap can create three common errors: treating neuroticism as a disorder, treating adversity as proof of a disorder, or assuming that neuroticism statistically “mediates” adversity effects in a way that proves a biological or psychological causal mechanism.
Mediation models can be useful for testing whether a statistical pathway is consistent with the data. They do not, by themselves, establish causal mediation when the variables are observational, retrospectively measured, or affected by unmeasured confounding. A finding that neuroticism partly accounts for an adversity–symptom association is therefore evidence about a statistical relationship, not proof that neuroticism is the mechanism through which adversity produces illness.
The diagnostic boundary is straightforward. High neuroticism does not diagnose PTSD, depression, anxiety disorders, OCD, personality disorders, ADHD, autism, or any other clinical condition. A trauma-related diagnosis requires its own exposure, symptom, duration, impairment, and differential-diagnosis criteria. Neuroticism can be a vulnerability factor or correlate without being the disorder itself.
What the Evidence Does Not Support
The evidence does not support the claim that all high neuroticism is caused by childhood trauma. Genetic influences, temperament, family environment, peer experiences, adult life events, health, culture, and many other developmental factors contribute to individual differences.
The evidence does not support using neuroticism as a hidden test for childhood abuse or neglect. An adult trait score cannot reconstruct a childhood history.
The evidence does not support treating childhood adversity as a deterministic personality sentence. Personality shows continuity and change across the lifespan, and people exposed to adversity follow diverse trajectories.
The evidence does not support interpreting a polygenic score, cortisol profile, brain-imaging pattern, or epigenetic marker as an individual diagnosis of trauma-caused neuroticism.
The evidence does not support assuming that every association between retrospective adversity and self-reported neuroticism is pure recall bias. Prospective research also links adversity with later outcomes, and retrospective reports can capture experiences missed by records. The scientifically defensible position is that both developmental effects and measurement processes can contribute.
Can Neuroticism Change After Childhood Adversity?
Yes. Neuroticism is relatively stable, which means people tend to preserve some rank ordering over time, but relative stability is not immutability. Mean levels can shift with age, individuals can change more or less than the average, and temporary states can also move personality questionnaire responses.
This distinction matters after adversity. A reduction in anxiety, depression, hyperarousal, or stress symptoms is not automatically the same thing as durable trait change. Conversely, a change in a neuroticism score does not prove that a person’s history has been erased or “healed.” Developmental and clinical outcomes operate at different levels.
Research on personality change and intervention belongs to its own evidence base. For this article, the key point is narrower: childhood adversity can be associated with adult neuroticism without fixing a person permanently at one trait level.
How to Interpret This Research for an Individual Person
Population evidence can inform an individual story, but it cannot decide that story. If someone has both a history of adversity and high neuroticism, it is reasonable to regard the history as one potentially relevant developmental influence. It is not possible to calculate how much of that person’s trait level came from adversity, genetics, temperament, later relationships, adult stress, or measurement context.
If the practical concern is current distress, the clinically relevant questions are about present symptoms, functioning, safety, trauma-related responses, mood, anxiety, sleep, relationships, and impairment. A broad personality score can add context, but it is not a substitute for condition-specific assessment. If the concern is personality measurement, interpretation should stay within the instrument actually used.
For a broader description of higher trait levels without assuming a childhood cause, see High Neuroticism: Meaning, Traits, Strengths, and Risks.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is childhood adversity associated with higher neuroticism?
Yes. The association is well supported. A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis of 136 studies and 526,371 people reported an overall positive association of g = 0.46 between childhood trauma and adult neuroticism, with variation by trauma subtype.
Does childhood trauma cause high neuroticism?
It may contribute causally for some people, but current evidence does not support a simple one-directional rule. Most studies are observational, and even longitudinal, sibling, or genetic designs cannot eliminate every alternative explanation. Shared family influences, inherited liability, temperament, later stress, and measurement processes also matter.
Which childhood adversity is most strongly linked with neuroticism?
In the 2026 meta-analysis, emotional neglect showed the largest subtype association, followed by emotional abuse. This is a meta-analytic pattern, not a ranking of how harmful different experiences are for every person or every outcome.
Can high neuroticism prove that someone experienced childhood trauma?
No. Neuroticism is a dimensional personality trait and has many developmental influences. A high score cannot identify whether a person experienced trauma, abuse, or neglect.
Can childhood adversity be inferred from a personality test?
No. NEO, BFI-2, IPIP, Eysenck, and related personality measures estimate personality dimensions. They are not validated forensic or diagnostic instruments for reconstructing childhood adversity.
Is neuroticism a trauma disorder?
No. Neuroticism is a personality construct. Trauma-related disorders are clinical diagnoses with their own criteria. Neuroticism may be associated with vulnerability to distress after adversity, but it is not itself PTSD or another trauma diagnosis.
Do genes explain the association?
Genes may explain part of the covariance through inherited influences on personality and through gene-environment correlation, but they do not explain the whole association and do not make adversity genetically predetermined. Polygenic findings are small, probabilistic, and population-specific.
Could neuroticism affect how people remember childhood adversity?
Possibly, to a modest degree. Prospective and retrospective measures of childhood adversity show limited agreement, and the Dunedin study found that people recalling more ACEs than had been prospectively recorded were somewhat more neurotic on average. The authors stressed that this personality effect was very small. It does not justify dismissing retrospective reports.
Does childhood adversity permanently change personality?
No deterministic conclusion is justified. Adversity can be associated with later personality differences, but personality remains capable of change and adversity-exposed people show wide variation in adult outcomes.
If I have high neuroticism and a difficult childhood, does that mean I need treatment for neuroticism?
Neuroticism itself is not a disease that requires treatment. Clinical care, when needed, targets distressing symptoms, functional problems, trauma-related difficulties, anxiety, depression, or other specific concerns. A personality measure can provide context but does not decide whether treatment is indicated.
Related Articles
References
Baldwin, J. R., Reuben, A., Newbury, J. B., & Danese, A. (2019). Agreement Between Prospective and Retrospective Measures of Childhood Maltreatment: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. JAMA Psychiatry, 76(6), 584–593. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.0097
Baldwin, J. R., Coleman, O., Francis, E. R., & Danese, A. (2024). Prospective and Retrospective Measures of Child Maltreatment and Their Association With Psychopathology: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. JAMA Psychiatry, 81(8), 769–781. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2024.0818
Bush, N. R., Sullivan, A. D. W., & Noroña-Zhou, A. (2026). Early Life Stress Effects on Children’s Biology, Behavior, and Health: Evidence, Mediators, Moderators, and Solutions. Annual Review of Psychology, 77, 451–483. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-072225-121053
Credé, M., Kim, H. S., Cindrich, S. L., Ferreira, P. A., Wasinger, G., Kim, E.-L., Karakaya, K., Seguin, H. R., Lopez, H. N., Muhammad, A. A., Goldstein, A. R., & Yurtsever, A. (2023). The relationship between adverse childhood experiences and non-clinical personality traits: A meta-analytic synthesis. Personality and Individual Differences, 200, 111868. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2022.111868
Fletcher, J. M., & Schurer, S. (2017). Origins of adulthood personality: The role of adverse childhood experiences. B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 17(2). https://doi.org/10.1515/bejeap-2015-0212
Hengartner, M. P., Cohen, L. J., Rodgers, S., Müller, M., Rössler, W., & Ajdacic-Gross, V. (2015). Association between childhood maltreatment and normal adult personality traits: Exploration of an understudied field. Journal of Personality Disorders, 29(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1521/pedi_2014_28_143
Klingenberg, B., Guloksuz, S., Pries, L.-K., et al. (2023). Gene–environment interaction study on the polygenic risk score for neuroticism, childhood adversity, and parental bonding. Personality Neuroscience, 6, e5. https://doi.org/10.1017/pen.2023.2
Lehto, K., Karlsson, I., Lundholm, C., & Pedersen, N. L. (2019). Genetic risk for neuroticism predicts emotional health depending on childhood adversity. Psychological Medicine, 49(2), 260–267. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291718000715
Luo, J., Zhang, B., & Roberts, B. W. (2021). Sensitization or inoculation: Investigating the effects of early adversity on personality traits and stress experiences in adulthood. PLOS ONE, 16(4), e0248822. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0248822
Ratanatharathorn, A., Koenen, K. C., Chibnik, L. B., Weisskopf, M. G., Rich-Edwards, J. W., & Roberts, A. L. (2021). Polygenic risk for autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, and neuroticism is associated with the experience of childhood abuse. Molecular Psychiatry, 26, 1696–1705. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-020-00996-w
Reuben, A., Moffitt, T. E., Caspi, A., Belsky, D. W., Harrington, H., Schroeder, F., Hogan, S., Ramrakha, S., Poulton, R., & Danese, A. (2016). Lest we forget: Comparing retrospective and prospective assessments of adverse childhood experiences in the prediction of adult health. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 57(10), 1103–1112. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.12621
Rosenek, N., Wake, S., Runton, R., Davies, A., Albaroudi, N., Pollen, A., Ellett, L., & Morriss, J. (2026). The relationship between childhood trauma and adult neuroticism: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review, 124, 102700. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2026.102700
Rosenman, S., & Rodgers, B. (2006). Childhood adversity and adult personality. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 40(5), 482–490. PubMed: 16683976