Do perceived control and time orientation mediate the effect of early life adversity on reproductive behaviour and health status? Insights from the European Value Study and the European Social Survey

An association between early life adversity and a range of coordinated behavioural responses that favour reproduction at the cost of a degraded health is often reported in humans. Recent theoretical works have proposed that perceived control—i.e., people’s belief that they are in control of external events that affect their lives—and time orientation—i.e., their tendency to live on a day-to-day basis or to plan for the future—are two closely related psychological traits mediating the associations between early life adversity, reproductive behaviours and health status. However, the empirical validity of this hypothesis remains to be demonstrated. In the present study, we examine the role of perceived control and time orientation in mediating the effects of early life adversity on a trade-off between reproductive traits (age at 1st childbirth, number of children) and health status by applying a cross-validated structural equation model frame on two large public survey datasets, the European Values Study (EVS, final N = 43,084) and the European Social Survey (ESS, final N = 31,065). Our results show that early life adversity, perceived control and time orientation are all associated with a trade-off favouring reproduction over health. However, perceived control and time orientation mediate only a small portion of the effect of early life adversity on the reproduction-health trade-off.