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

美国的墨西哥裔儿童和成年人经常受到歧视。歧视对包括压力和焦虑在内的许多身心健康结果都有负面影响。大约三分之一的十几岁女孩受到压力和焦虑的影响，特别是在拉丁裔青少年中，这一比例在过去几年里有所上升。然而，我们对焦虑等心理健康问题是如何随着时间的推移而增加的，以及它们是否通过影响大脑发育而增加，我们知之甚少。拉美裔女孩因种族、家庭和文化特征以及性别而遭受多种形式的不公平待遇，因此面临压力和焦虑的风险。这项研究考察了在青少年早期反复受到不公平待遇是否会影响拉美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。儿童和青少年的过渡时期是一个特别重要的研究阶段，因为与威胁和安全学习相关的大脑区域仍在发育中。这项研究是首批包括新方法的研究之一，这种方法允许我们比较儿童在观看不同的社交和情感场景时的大脑模式。通过使用这些新的方法，随着时间的推移，这项研究检查了重复歧视如何影响大脑功能，并导致焦虑、压力和缺乏安全感。我们关注在南加州长大的拉美裔女孩及其父母的独特经历，他们的文化身份和受到歧视的经历塑造了他们。这样做有助于更好地了解社区健康和大脑发育，并提供更有效的做法和政策，满足该地区和全国家庭的需求。族裔种族歧视--定义为以族裔或种族群体成员身份为由对个人的差别待遇--是少数族裔青年面临的突出现实和威胁。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种族歧视的经历，绝大多数拉丁裔个人报告说，他们受到了基于其种族背景的不公平待遇。当一个孩子经历种族种族歧视时，大脑会将其识别为需要立即做出反应的压力源，但随着时间的推移，这也会成为一个习得的过程，产生预期并提高对未来可能暴露的威胁的警惕。对于小规模的年轻人来说，焦虑等心理健康问题是如何在这段时间内积累起来的，以及它们是否通过改变大脑发育的轨迹来实现这一点，人们知之甚少。一项新的文献表明，与其他种族和民族相比，拉丁裔女孩表现出更高的未经治疗的焦虑症诊断率。这项纵向研究的目标是检查神经生物学途径，通过这些途径，种族种族歧视的累积经验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。我们使用潜伏变化得分模型来识别墨西哥人在儿童中期后期和青春期早期通过行为和多变量神经成像识别拉丁裔女孩对威胁和安全学习的感知和情感贡献，并检验种族种族歧视经历和父母社会化对高度威胁警觉和过度泛化的神经特征的独立和交互影响-安全刺激不准确地分类为威胁。威胁和安全学习的新概念认为，在不将威胁不适当地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绪神经回路中的安全表征，还取决于影响儿童感知环境的高级视觉区域。该模型还详细说明了种族种族歧视经历对女孩威胁和安全的神经表征的影响。了解这样的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。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.