I believe this has been known for decades!
"... According to the study, published March 5 in the journal Communications Psychology, experiencing low-to-moderate levels of adversity during middle childhood (between the ages of 6 and 12) and adolescence may foster resilience to anxiety later in life.
The researchers found that those individuals who developed resilience to mental health challenges exhibited distinct patterns of brain activation when asked to differentiate between danger and safety, a process that is known to be disrupted in people with anxiety disorders. ..."
From the abstract:
"Parsing heterogeneity in the nature of adversity exposure and neurobiological functioning may facilitate better understanding of how adversity shapes individual variation in risk for and resilience against anxiety. One putative mechanism linking adversity exposure with anxiety is disrupted threat and safety learning. Here, we applied a person-centered approach (latent profile analysis) to characterize patterns of adversity exposure at specific developmental stages and threat/safety discrimination in corticolimbic circuitry in 120 young adults.
We then compared how the resultant profiles differed in anxiety symptoms. Three latent profiles emerged:
(1) a group with lower lifetime adversity, higher neural activation to threat, and lower neural activation to safety;
(2) a group with moderate adversity during middle childhood and adolescence, lower neural activation to threat, and higher neural activation to safety; and
(3) a group with higher lifetime adversity exposure and minimal neural activation to both threat and safety.
Individuals in the second profile had lower anxiety than the other profiles. These findings demonstrate how variability in within-person combinations of adversity exposure and neural threat/safety discrimination can differentially relate to anxiety, and suggest that for some individuals, moderate adversity exposure during middle childhood and adolescence could be associated with processes that foster resilience to future anxiety."
For some [many], childhood adversity can promote resilience to anxiety disorders | Yale News "In a new study, Yale psychologists discover a link between childhood adversity, neurodevelopment, and resilience to anxiety as an adult — but timing matters."
Fig. 3: Differences between latent profiles (n = 14 in profile 1; n = 66 in profile 2; n = 40 in profile 3) in neural activation are presented.
