Individual differences in timing of susceptibility to adverse effects of family dysfunction.

Do adolescents vary in the timing of their susceptibility to family-related adversity? Does early exposure to family dysfunction affect later adolescent plasticity? To address these two questions an influence statistic, DFBETAS, was used to capture degree to which 605,344 Danish children (294,479 females, 5.21% immigrants; race/ethnicity information not available in Danish registry) appeared susceptible to the adverse effects of household dysfunction measured annually at ages 0-5 and 13-18 on problematic development at age 18-19. Degree of susceptibility to family-adversity effects proved generally consistent across periods (γ = 0.5195), though for a not insubstantial number of adolescents this was decidedly not the case, as they were highly dissimilar (N = 80,408, 13.28%). Also, greater early-adversity susceptibility did not forecast reduced adolescent susceptibility, as has been hypothesized, but just the opposite. Future research can address the generalizability of these findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).