Mechanisms underlying resilience to neighborhood disadvantage

几十年的研究已经证实了邻里劣势对 身体、社会经济和心理健康结果。即便如此，在中国长大的许多孩子 处于不利地位的社区环境显示出适应能力。儿童如何取得成就？ 面对这样的逆境，这些具有韧性的结果是什么？现有的研究表明，家族性和 社区层面的因素保护这些儿童免受在弱势群体中发现的许多压力。 邻里关系。然而，很少有研究考虑神经行为途径 这些保护过程赋予了它们韧性。拟议的UG3/UH3将做到这一点， 识别恢复力的神经标记物并阐明多水平的表观遗传、环境和 保护因素促进这些神经弹性通路的遗传过程。我们 建议重新评估500对青少年双胞胎的样本(年龄在11-16岁；以前评估过 年龄在6到10岁之间)，居住在中等到严重贫困的社区。我们会 采用尖端的神经成像方法(即，连接任务和休息功能磁共振的联合模型， DTI和sMRI)，以识别与弹性相关的协同神经网络 (在这里操作为适应能力和没有精神病理学)，同时也 利用我们独特的高危双胞胎样本的纵向和遗传信息性质 阐明恢复力神经标记物背后的病因过程。我们特别假设 通过保护年轻人免受压力源的影响，积极的父母和 社区使儿童能够发展标准化的神经结构，以支持随后的 适应性结果，即使在逆境中也是如此。我们的遗传信息发育 因此，神经科学方法将提供一个前所未有的机会来阐明多层次的 导致韧性的生物行为途径，通过这种方式，从根本上促进我们的 理解在面对长期逆境时的适应。

Decades of research have confirmed the damaging effects of neighborhood disadvantage on physical, socioeconomic, and mental health outcomes. Even so, many children growing up in disadvantaged neighborhood contexts demonstrate adaptive competence. How do children achieve these resilient outcomes in the face of such adversity? Extant studies indicate that familial- and community-level factors protect these children from the many stressors found in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Very little work, however, has considered the neurobehavioral pathways through which these protective processes confer resilience. The proposed UG3/UH3 will do just this, identifying neural markers of resilience and illuminating the multilevel epigenetic, environmental, and genetic processes through which protective factors promote these neuro-resilient pathways. We propose to re-assess a sample of 500 adolescent twin pairs (at age 11-16 years; previously assessed between ages 6 and 10) residing in modestly-to-severely disadvantaged neighborhoods. We will employ cutting-edge neuroimaging methodologies (i.e., joint models that bridge task and resting fMRI, DTI, and sMRI) to identify the synergistic neural networks that are associated with resilience (operationalized here as adaptive competence and the absence of psychopathology), while also capitalizing on the longitudinal and genetically-informed nature of our unique `at-risk' twin sample to illuminate the etiologic processes underlying neural markers of resilience. We specifically postulate that, by protecting youth from the stressors presents in disadvantage contexts, positive parents and communities enable children to develop the normative neural architecture that undergirds subsequent adaptive outcomes, even in the face of adversity. Our genetically-informed developmental neuroscience approach will thus provide an unprecedented opportunity to illuminate the multilevel biobehavioral pathways leading to resilience, and in this way, fundamentally advance our understanding of adaptation in the face of chronic adversity.