Adverse life events were a prominent environmental (triggering) variable across many of the studies21,31–33,41,47,49. As a category, they represented a number of different experiences: childhood maltreatment; early life trauma; life transitions; experiences of illness and death; disruptions in the home; and witnessing/exposure to family violence. These risk factors sometimes extended beyond social network influences to include exposure to violence and crime at the community or neighborhood level (e.g., Goyal et al.32, Sartor et al.21). Generally, composite measures of stressful life events incorporated a wide variety of circumstances, which can complicate the understanding and isolation of environmental exposures that contribute to a GxE effect12.
