The effect of negative life events on longitudinal change of surface anatomy

Abstract Life events during adolescence are a crucial stressor in human lifeand play a pivotal role in inividuals’ mental health. Although a growing number of researches have made an encouraging progress in understanding the behavioral architecture of life events, the longitudinal study to investigate the brain structures changes underlying life eventsremains unclear. We aimed to explore the neural substrate underlying life events and investigate the impact of life events on individual differences in human adolescent brain development. We used structural magnetic resonance imaging scans from 734 college students (mean age=19.49), including 443 participants from whom two scan time points (interval time: 699.03 days; range: 203-1268 days; SD=246.99 days) were collected. We measured the life events by using the Adolescent Self-Rating Life Events Checklist (ASLEC). We found that a) grey matter volume (GMV) in the right middle temporal gyrus (MTG) was associated with ASLEC total scores and b) volume delta in the right MTG between two brain scan time points were significantly negatively correlated with ASLEC total scores. The negative life events not only promoted the advance maturation in MTG, but also induce the abnormal deceleration of the MTG growth according to the lifespan development with inverted-U shape.