CAREER: Ethnic-racial discrimination influences on neural representation of threat learning in Latina girls: A multivariate modeling approach

职业：民族种族歧视对拉丁裔女孩威胁学习的神经表征的影响：多元建模方法

• 批准号: 2239067
• 负责人: Kalina Michalska
• 金额: $ 69.95万
• 依托单位: University of California-Riverside
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-04-01 至 2028-03-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2239067&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Ethnic; racial; discrimination; influences

Children and adults of Mexican descent in the United States are often exposed to discrimination. Discrimination has negative effects on many physical and mental health outcomes, including stress and anxiety. About one third of teen girls are affected by stress and anxiety, and rates among Latina teens in particular have risen over the last few years. However, we know little about how mental health problems like anxiety increase over that time and whether they do so by affecting brain development. Latina girls experience many forms of unfair treatment based on race, family and cultural characteristics, and gender, and are therefore at risk for experiencing stress and anxiety. This study examines whether repeated exposure to unfair treatment during the early teenage years affects how Latina girls learn to distinguish threat from safety, and how parents can play a role in protecting their daughters from the harmful effects of discrimination. The transition between childhood and the early teenage years is an especially important period to study as brain regions related to threat and safety learning are still developing. This study is among the first to include new methods that allow us to compare children’s brain patterns when they view different social and emotional scenes. By using these new methods over time, this research examines how repeated discrimination can affect brain function and lead to anxiety, stress, and feelings of lack of safety. We focus on the unique experiences of Latina girls growing up in Southern California and their parents, who are shaped by their cultural identities and their experiences of discrimination. Doing so leads to a better understanding of community health and brain development, and it informs more effective practices and policies that address the needs of families across the region and the country. Ethnic-racial discrimination—defined as differential treatment of individuals on the grounds of ethnic or racial group membership, is a salient reality and threat for minoritized youth. The immigration policy contexts and the discourse around it has heightened Latinxs’ experiences with ethnic-racial discrimination and an overwhelming majority of Latinx individuals report being subjected to unfair treatment based on their ethnic background. When a child experiences ethnic-racial discrimination, the brain identifies it as a stressor requiring immediate response, but over time, it also becomes a learned process that creates anticipation and heightened threat vigilance towards possible future exposures. For minoritized youth, little is known about how mental health problems like anxiety accumulate over that time and whether they do so by altering trajectories of brain development. A nascent literature has shown that Latina girls, specifically, demonstrate higher rates of untreated anxiety diagnoses relative to other racial and ethnic groups. The goal of this longitudinal study is to examine neurobiological pathways through which cumulative experiences of ethnic-racial discrimination may be associated with integrity of brain networks that detect and regulate threat responses in Latina girls. We use latent change score models to identify perceptual and emotional contributions to threat and safety learning in Mexican-identifying Latina girls during late middle childhood and early adolescence via behavior and multivariate neuroimaging, and examine the independent and interactive influence of ethnic-racial discrimination experiences and parental socialization on neural signatures of heightened threat vigilance and overgeneralization—the inaccurate classification of safe stimuli as threatening. The novel conceptualization of threat and safety learning posits that maintaining flexible distinctions between threat and safety without inappropriately attributing threats to non-harmful stimuli, depends on safety representations not only in previously identified emotion neurocircuitry, but also in higher-order visual areas, affecting how a child perceives her environment. The model also specifies the influence of ethnic-racial discrimination experiences on girls’ neural representations of threat and safety. Understanding how such experiences affect representations of threat and safety is a crucial next step for the science of threat learning in childhood, particularly in this underrepresented population.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

在美国，墨西哥裔儿童和成人经常受到歧视。歧视对许多身心健康结果产生负面影响，包括压力和焦虑。大约三分之一的少女受到压力和焦虑的影响，在过去几年中，拉丁裔青少年的比例尤其上升。然而，我们对焦虑等心理健康问题是如何在这段时间内增加的，以及它们是否通过影响大脑发育来增加，知之甚少。拉丁裔女孩经历了基于种族、家庭和文化特征以及性别的多种形式的不公平待遇，因此面临压力和焦虑的风险。本研究考察了在青少年早期反复遭受不公平待遇是否会影响拉丁裔女孩如何学会区分威胁和安全，以及父母如何在保护女儿免受歧视的有害影响方面发挥作用。儿童和青少年早期之间的过渡时期是研究的一个特别重要的时期，因为与威胁和安全学习相关的大脑区域仍在发育。这项研究是第一个采用新方法来比较儿童在观看不同的社交和情感场景时的大脑模式的研究之一。通过长期使用这些新方法，这项研究检验了反复的歧视是如何影响大脑功能并导致焦虑、压力和缺乏安全感的。我们关注的是在南加州长大的拉丁裔女孩及其父母的独特经历，他们的文化身份和歧视经历塑造了他们。这样做可以更好地了解社区卫生和大脑发育，并为更有效的做法和政策提供信息，以满足整个区域和全国家庭的需求。对少数民族青年来说，种族歧视是一个突出的现实和威胁。种族歧视的定义是基于族裔或种族群体成员身份对个人的差别待遇。移民政策背景和围绕移民政策的讨论加剧了拉丁裔人遭受种族歧视的经历，绝大多数拉丁裔人报告说，他们受到了基于种族背景的不公平待遇。当一个孩子经历种族歧视时，大脑会将其识别为需要立即反应的压力源，但随着时间的推移，它也会成为一个学习过程，对未来可能出现的威胁产生预期和更高的警惕性。对于少数族裔的年轻人来说，人们对焦虑等心理健康问题是如何在这段时间内积累的，以及它们是否通过改变大脑发育轨迹来积累的，知之甚少。一项新兴的文献表明，与其他种族和族裔群体相比，拉丁裔女孩的未经治疗的焦虑诊断率更高。这项纵向研究的目的是检查神经生物学途径，通过这些途径，种族歧视的累积经历可能与检测和调节拉丁裔女孩威胁反应的大脑网络的完整性有关。我们使用潜在变化评分模型，通过行为和多变量神经成像来确定在儿童期中后期和青春期早期识别墨西哥裔拉丁女孩的威胁和安全学习中感知和情感的贡献。并研究种族歧视经历和父母社会化对威胁警惕性提高和过度概括（将安全刺激不准确地分类为威胁）的神经特征的独立和互动影响。威胁和安全学习的新概念假设，在不不适当地将威胁归因于无害刺激的情况下，保持威胁和安全之间的灵活区别，不仅取决于先前确定的情感神经回路中的安全表征，而且取决于高阶视觉区域的安全表征，影响儿童如何感知她的环境。该模型还详细说明了种族歧视经历对女孩的威胁和安全神经表征的影响。了解这些经历如何影响威胁和安全的表征是儿童威胁学习科学的关键下一步，特别是在这个代表性不足的人群中。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。