It Doesn’t End There: Mental Health Difficulties across Ages 3-14 Mediate the Long-Term Association between Early-Life Adversity and Poorer Cognitive Functioning

Little is known about how mental health mediates the association between early-life adversity and cognitive functioning. In a large (N=13,287) longitudinal (5 wave) sample, we found that past and current mental health have a substantial mediating effect on working memory (59%) and vocabulary (65%) performances following early-life adversity.