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

在美国，墨西哥裔的儿童和成年人经常受到歧视。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，特别是拉丁裔青少年的比例在过去几年中有所上升。然而，我们对焦虑等心理健康问题如何随着时间的推移而增加以及它们是否通过影响大脑发育而增加知之甚少。拉丁裔女孩经历基于种族，家庭和文化特征以及性别的多种形式的不公平待遇，因此有可能经历压力和焦虑。本研究探讨是否重复暴露于不公平的待遇在青少年早期影响拉丁裔女孩如何学会区分威胁与安全，以及父母如何发挥作用，保护自己的女儿免受歧视的有害影响。儿童期和青少年早期之间的过渡期是一个特别重要的研究时期，因为与威胁和安全学习相关的大脑区域仍在发展。这项研究是第一个包括新方法的研究，这些方法使我们能够比较儿童在观看不同社交和情感场景时的大脑模式。随着时间的推移，通过使用这些新方法，这项研究探讨了重复的歧视如何影响大脑功能，并导致焦虑，压力和缺乏安全感。我们专注于在南加州长大的拉丁裔女孩和他们的父母的独特经历，他们的文化身份和歧视的经历塑造了他们。这样做可以更好地了解社区健康和大脑发育，并为解决整个地区和国家家庭需求的更有效的做法和政策提供信息。民族-种族歧视-定义为基于民族或种族群体成员身份对个人的区别对待，是少数群体青年面临的一个突出现实和威胁。移民政策背景和围绕它的话语加剧了拉丁裔的经验与种族歧视和绝大多数的拉丁裔个人报告受到基于其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做出反应的压力源，但随着时间的推移，它也成为一个学习过程，对未来可能的风险产生预期和提高威胁警惕。对于少数民族化的年轻人，人们对焦虑等心理健康问题如何随着时间的推移而积累以及他们是否通过改变大脑发育的轨迹来做到这一点知之甚少。一项新的文献表明，拉丁裔女孩，特别是，表现出较高的比率未经治疗的焦虑诊断相对于其他种族和民族群体。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相关。我们使用潜在变化评分模型来识别墨西哥人对威胁和安全学习的感知和情感贡献-通过行为和多变量神经成像来识别童年中期后期和青春期早期的拉丁裔女孩，并研究民族种族歧视经历和父母社会化对提高威胁警惕和过度概括的神经特征的独立和互动影响-将安全刺激不准确地归类为威胁。威胁和安全学习的新概念假设，保持威胁和安全之间的灵活区别，而不适当地归因于非有害刺激的威胁，不仅取决于安全表示在先前确定的情绪神经回路，而且在高阶视觉区域，影响孩子如何感知她的环境。该模型还详细说明了民族种族歧视的经验对女孩的威胁和安全的神经表征的影响。了解这些经历如何影响威胁和安全的表征是儿童时期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NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

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.