Childhood maltreatment and mid-life cognitive functioning: divergent psychosocial pathways linked to ethnoracial group

Childhood maltreatment has lasting adverse effects across multiple domains, contributing to cumulative disadvantage and accelerated aging. These outcomes may reflect not only individual vulnerability, but also ethnoracial-related differences in lived experience, highlighting how sociocultural contexts shape long-term risk. The effect of childhood maltreatment on cognitive functioning later in life varies, raising questions about the mechanisms that drive this association. Data were drawn from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study. Participants were categorized into two racial groups for analysis; non-Hispanic white and ethnoracial minority. Physiological and psychosocial variables were pulled from wave II and cognitive variables were extracted from waves II and III. At wave II, the analytic sample included 692 adults (56% female, 19.5% ethnoracial minority, age: 53.43 ± 10.72 years). Serial mediation models evaluated whether depression and perceived stress linked childhood maltreatment to later cognitive decline, predicting wave III cognitive functioning while controlling for wave II cognitive decline, in the overall sample and by ethnoracial subsamples. In the full sample, the relationship between childhood maltreatment and cognitive decline was fully mediated via the indirect pathway from depression to perceived stress. Ethnoracial minority status significantly moderated the association between depression and perceived stress, yet, the subgroups estimates of the indirect pathway were not significantly different from each other. In the non-Hispanic white group, the total effect of childhood maltreatment on cognitive functioning was not significant (b = − 0.0014, p = 0.283), but a significant indirect pathway existed through depression to stress (b = − 0.0012, 95%CI [− 0.0023, − 0.0003]). However, in the ethnoracial minority group, the total and direct effects of childhood maltreatment on cognitive performance were significant (b = − 0.0079, p = 0.001, and b = − 0.0066, p = 0.013, respectively) with no significant indirect pathways. These findings highlight distinct psychosocial pathways that link childhood maltreatment to cognitive aging and underscore the importance of contextually relevant prevention and intervention strategies.