Illuminating the Developmental Etiology of Youth Resilience

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Project Summary/Abstract Youth resilience is best conceptualized as multidimensional1–3 and dynamic,4–6 such that individuals may demonstrate changes in academic, social, or psychiatric resilience over time. Despite this broad consensus, the majority of empirical work on resilience has been cross-sectional and tends to focus on a single domain of resilience (e.g., psychiatric resilience). This has notably limited the field’s understanding of the development of resilience over time, including the trajectories that best characterize resilience, the specific biological mechanisms underlying those trajectories, and whether domains of resilience follow similar or disparate developmental courses. The current F31 proposal will address these gaps in the literature by examining the developmental etiology of youth resilience to neighborhood adversity by using a large multi-informant and multi-wave dataset of twins exposed to substantial levels of neighborhood disadvantage (e.g., poverty, community violence). Specific Aim 1 will employ growth mixture models to group individuals based on their domain-specific patterns of resilience (i.e., academic, social, psychiatric) across three time points: middle childhood, early adolescence, and late adolescence; the first study of its kind. Specific Aim 2 will identify longitudinally-predictive biomarkers of resilience trajectories through the first methylome wide association study (MWAS) of resilience development. To eliminate genetic confounds prominent in human epigenetic studies, I will also include discordant monozygotic twin difference analyses. By illuminating the developmental etiology of resilience, these findings should inform policy and intervention efforts for youth in disadvantaged neighborhood contexts. To facilitate the completion of these aims, the proposed NRSA fellowship will provide training in 1) longitudinal statistical methods, 2) advanced epigenetic analytics, 3) the development of an integrated, conceptual theory of the development of resilience (essential for understanding the results for scientific aims 1 and 2 given the dearth of relevant literature), 4) the preparation of grants and manuscripts, and 5) the ethical conduct of research. These five areas of training will significantly further my development as an independent interdisciplinary researcher and ultimately facilitate my goal of creating a program of research focused on the study of youth resilience within a developmentally, genetically, and environmentally informed context.