Early home environments and reward-processing in adolescence: The unique role of harsh parenting

Reward-processing, i.e., how one evaluates potential reward and punishment and how one uses this information to make decisions, is strongly related to mental health and is especially useful for understanding motivation, in turn associated with many health, educational and socio-economic outcomes. Research has yet to explore the role of the home's emotional and physical environment early in life on reward-processing in adolescence, a period characterised by increased reward sensitivity.

We carried out this study to fill this gap.

We used data from the Millennium Cohort Study, a large, nationally-representative longitudinal birth cohort in the UK.

We explored reward-based decision-making (using the Cambridge Gambling Task [CGT]) at age 11 years as a function of three aspects of the home environment at age 3 years (assessed by the Short Form of the Home Observation Measurement of the Environment [HOME-SF]): physical organisation of the home, mother's emotional and verbal responsivity, and mother's use of harsh discipline (N = 10,202).

Harsh discipline was significantly associated with risk-taking but no other measure on the CGT. Physical organisation and maternal responsivity were not related to any CGT measures. The association between harsh discipline and risk-taking was robust to adjustment for the other HOME-SF variables and confounders including sex, ethnicity, developmental milestones, family income, family structure, home overcrowding, maternal mental health and maternal education but also current (age 11) cognitive ability and pubertal status.

Harsh parenting early in life increases reward sensitivity (or decreases punishment sensitivity) on the cusp of adolescence.