Figure 1.

Conceptual illustration of the possibility of a developmental trade-off associated with accelerated maturation of the emotion processing system following ELS (A) as compared to no developmental trade-off (B). To date, the majority of studies examining functional connectivity following ELS have focused on the development of emotion processing systems, with limited work devoted to the functional development of other systems. Behavioral work in individuals who have experienced childhood poverty, maltreatment, and institutional care suggests that the effects of early adversity extend beyond emotion processing and include difficulty processing reward-related information. As such, it may be that the accelerated maturation of emotion-related systems comes at the cost of the development of other neural systems. Due to differences in the maturational courses of neural systems it will be important for future work to evaluate the relative maturity of emotion and reward processing systems to evaluate the possibility of a developmental trade-off.