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Abstract
The development of psychopathology increased significantly in adolescence, a period marked by increased sensitivity to environmental stressors. Psychosocial stressors elevate risk by disrupting emotional, cognitive, and behavioral regulation. Sleep health and neural systems changes may mediate or moderate this risk, influencing trajectories of vulnerability and resilience. Despite this, there is substantial individual variability in these pathways. In this dissertation, I aim to use three manuscripts and apply the developmental psychopathology framework to examine the factors and processes contributing to this heterogeneity. Data for the dissertation is drawn from the Adolescent Behavior Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. At baseline, the study recruits 11,878 children aged 9 to 10 years with diverse backgrounds and follows them annually through a three-year follow-up (mean age =12.94).In the first study, I focus on the default mode network (DMN), a critical neural network involved in self-regulation, bioregulatory sleep processes, and risk for psychopathology. Specifically, I examine DMN resting-state functional connectivity as a moderator in the indirect link between psychosocial stressors and psychopathology via sleep problems. The findings suggest that DMN cohesion connectivity accounts for the heterogeneity of the link between psychosocial stressors, sleep health, and youth behavioral outcomes. The second study examines the heterogeneity of sleep patterns and their association with psychopathology. Four distinct sleep profiles are identified using latent profile analysis. The results show that adolescents in less optimal sleep profiles had the highest behavioral problems. The third study tests the heterogeneity of neural network connectivity and its association with sleep and psychopathology. Five core emotion and attention networks are used to extract distinct neural connectivity profiles, including DMN, salience, frontoparietal, ventral, and dorsal attention networks. The findings underscore the complexity and variability of neural connectivity patterns and provide valuable insights into sleep-related risks for the development of psychopathology.
These three papers serve as the cornerstone of my doctoral research and examine the diverse psychosocial, bioregulatory, and neural pathways underlying the development of psychopathology. The findings further highlight individual differences, sleep pattern variability, and neural network connectivity. My work informs preventive interventions to improve sleep health and neural development and mitigate adolescent behavioral risks.