# STRESS, MEMORY, AND RUMINATION IN MALTREATED ADOLESCENTS

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-IRVINE · 2024 · $637,590

## Abstract

Project Summary
Child maltreatment is one of the most formidable public health crises in the United States,
affecting millions of youth each year. The adverse consequences of maltreatment for youth, as
well as for their families and entire communities, are pervasive, costly, and enduring. To
intervene and reduce these consequences, it is imperative that victims provide clear and
accurate accounts of their prior experiences. Currently, considerable skepticism exists regarding
maltreated youth’s ability to provide such accounts, especially for experiences that were
stressful, leading to youths’ reports being challenged or not believed. We contend that this
skepticism is unwarranted, and maltreated youth actually demonstrate better memory than their
non-maltreated counterparts, but only for stressful salient personal experiences. We will
ethically and rigorously test this possibility in the proposed study via a short-term longitudinal
experimental investigation that compares the effects of acute stress on memory between
maltreated and demographically matched non-maltreated 12-17-year-olds. In an initial in-person
session, youth will be randomly assigned (equal maltreated and non-maltreated youth across
age) to complete standardized salient personal activities that are experimentally manipulated to
vary in whether they induce higher or lower levels of acute stress. Immediately afterward, youth
will complete an encoding task comprised of positive, negative, and neutral images. In
subsequent sessions (two remote and one in person) spanning approximately one month,
youth’s memory will be tested for the images via a recognition task asking them to discriminate
previously seen from unseen images and for the personal activities via recall and direct
questions that probe for the extent and accuracy of memory. Youth’s rumination about the
personal activities will also be measured. Our main hypothesis is that maltreatment will lead to
particularly robust memory for the personal activities, but only when the youth complete these
under conditions of high stress. By contrast, because the emotional and neutral images are not
personally meaningful, we expect maltreatment to constrain youth’s memory performance for
the images. We also hypothesize that rumination will serve as an important mediator of the links
between stress and memory for the higher stress personal activities, most notably in the
maltreated youth. Overall, our results will provide much-needed knowledge about the precise
ways that maltreatment shapes different facets of youth’s memory, knowledge that will be
enormously valuable in improving trust in maltreated youth’s reporting of stressful experiences
and hence in directing interventions for victimized youth.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10982189
- **Project number:** 1R01HD113752-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-IRVINE
- **Principal Investigator:** JODI ANNE QUAS
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $637,590
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2024-08-01 → 2029-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10982189

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10982189, STRESS, MEMORY, AND RUMINATION IN MALTREATED ADOLESCENTS (1R01HD113752-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-28 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10982189. Licensed CC0.

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