Psychological Development and Early Life Adversity: Cross-cultural Differences in Risk and Resilience

Children around the world encounter adversity in many forms, including poverty, trauma, family instability, and prenatal stress. Yet the developmental consequences of these experiences are not uniform: culture shapes how adversity is experienced, interpreted, and buffered. Despite growing recognition of this, developmental science has relied heavily on samples drawn from Western, high-income contexts, limiting the generalizability of findings on risk and resilience. This Research Topic aims to consolidate and advance knowledge on how early life adversity shapes psychological development across diverse cultural settings. By bringing together empirical and theoretical contributions from researchers working across different national and cultural contexts, we aim to identify which pathways from adversity to developmental outcome are universal and which are moderated by cultural, familial, or community-level factors. This work has direct implications for the design of targeted, culturally informed interventions and policies.

Early life adversity encompasses a broad range of experiences, from prenatal stress and household instability to community violence and socioeconomic deprivation. These exposures have been linked to altered neurobiological development, including dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, disrupted executive function, and changes in brain structure and connectivity. Critically, however, the magnitude and nature of these effects appear to vary across cultural contexts. Cultural norms influence the perceived severity of specific adversities, the availability of social support, and the caregiving practices that may buffer or amplify developmental risk. Theoretical frameworks such as differential susceptibility and biological sensitivity to context have begun to account for this variation, but large-scale cross-cultural empirical work remains scarce.

This Research Topic welcomes contributions examining the relationship between early life adversity and psychological development, with explicit attention to cross-cultural variation in risk and resilience. Relevant themes include: neurobiological and cognitive mechanisms linking adversity to developmental outcomes; cultural moderators of adversity effects, including family structure, community cohesion, and culturally specific coping strategies; prenatal and postnatal adversity across diverse socioeconomic and geographic contexts; methodological approaches for conducting valid cross-cultural adversity research; and protective factors promoting resilience in high-adversity environments.

We welcome:
• Original Research
• Systematic Reviews
• Meta-analyses
• Reviews, and
• Hypothesis and Theory articles.
► Studies using diverse, non-WEIRD samples are particularly encouraged as are longitudinal and cross-national comparative designs.
► Contributions should be grounded in developmental psychology rather than clinical or psychiatric frameworks; the topic is concerned with normative developmental variation, not psychopathological outcomes.

If you were not directly invited by the Topic Editors but wish to submit, you are welcome to do so; however, please contact us at developmentalpsychology@frontiersin.org before submitting and wait for our confirmation that your manuscript is within scope.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: early life adversity, resilience, cross-cultural development, psychological development, trauma, HPA axis, executive function, prenatal stress, cultural context, risk factors

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.