Effects of poverty on affective development: A multi-level, longitudinal study

项目摘要 在美国，五分之一的儿童在贫困中长大。这些儿童面临着精神病理学的高风险， 往往持续一生，并使低下的社会经济地位永久化。因此，贫穷及其后遗症是一个 重大公共卫生问题。贫困儿童往往经历更大的长期压力，这可能使贫困 通过改变脑和下丘脑-垂体-肾上腺（HPA）轴功能而生物嵌入。通过 通过研究在贫困相关压力下成长的青少年，该研究将解释RDoC持续威胁 响应RFA-MH-14-050的构建体。人们对贫困如何影响潜在的生物多样性知之甚少。 机制，并引起症状，如焦虑和抑郁。这种知识的缺乏阻碍了 努力制定干预措施，针对将贫困与精神病理学联系起来的机制。我们的目标是 更好地了解贫困如何影响发育过程中的生物学，并导致精神病理学。中央 一种假设是，贫穷增加了四种压力源的发生率（暴露于危险、家庭 冲突，居住不稳定，忽视），导致HPA轴失调，增加杏仁核激活 而从腹内侧前额叶皮层到杏仁核的调节联系则不太成熟; 暴露于与贫困相关的压力源导致下丘脑-垂体-肾上腺轴和杏仁核过度兴奋， 积极的，导致系统性的转向更大的分配神经和认知资源，以消极的 事件和更多的负面影响，包括焦虑和抑郁症状，如自我和 家长报告青少年将从脆弱家庭和儿童福利研究（FFCWS）中进行评估， 正在对主要来自低收入家庭的儿童进行研究。FFCWS的属性是：1）儿童 在出生时、1岁、3岁、5岁和9岁时进行评估，并将在15岁时进行评估; 2）样本代表 出生在他们城市的孩子，因此，与几乎所有其他脑成像研究不同，研究结果是普遍的; 3)虽然样本中的贫困程度很高，但考虑到以下因素， 比较;和4）青年现在进入青春期中期-一个风险增加的时期， 精神病理学当受试者15岁时，情感功能将在四个分析层面进行评估：1）大脑 (with功能性磁共振成像，以评估对情绪面孔和扩散的激活和连接 张量成像测量结构连接）; 2）HPA轴（通过测量皮质醇响应于 压力源和DHEA）; 3）行为（使用注意力偏差测量）;和4）自我和父母报告的测量， 17岁时进行随访的负面影响。FFCWS的发展史（经济状况，症状， 在这四个分析层次上，父母教养）将映射到情感功能。通过利用FFCWS， 该团队有能力进行研究，将童年时期的经验与 神经生物学和心理学数据，以更好地阐明精神病理学的主要途径。

Project Summary One in five children in the US grows up in poverty. These children face high risk for psychopathology, which often lasts a lifetime and perpetuates low socioeconomic status. Thus, poverty and its sequelae represent a major public health problem. Poor children often experience greater chronic stress, which may allow poverty to become biologically embedded by altering brain and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis function. By examining teens growing up with poverty-related stressors, the study will explicate the RDoC Sustained Threat Construct in response to RFA-MH-14-050. Little is known about how poverty impacts underlying biological mechanisms and gives rise to symptoms, such as anxiety and depression. This lack of knowledge hinders efforts to develop interventions targeting mechanisms linking poverty and psychopathology. Our objective is to better understand how poverty affects biology during development and leads to psychopathology. The central hypothesis is that poverty increases the occurrence of four types of stressors (exposure to danger, family conflict, residential instability, neglect), which leads to HPA axis dysregulation, increased amygdala activation and less mature regulatory connections from the ventromedial prefrontal cortex to the amygdala; extended exposure to poverty-related stressors leads to a protracted period when the HPA axis and amygdala are hyper- active, resulting in a systemic shift toward greater allocation of neural and cognitive resources to negative events and more negative affect, including anxiety and depression symptoms, as measured with self- and parental-reports. Teens will be assessed from The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS), an ongoing study of children born to predominantly low-income families. Attributes of the FFCWS are: 1) children were assessed at birth, 1, 3, 5 and 9 years and will be assessed at 15; 2) the sample is representative of children born in their city and, thus, unlike almost all other brain imaging research, findings are generalizable; 3) Although the sample contains high levels of poverty, a full range of incomes are represented allowing for comparisons; and 4) Youth are now entering mid-adolescence - a period of heightened risk for psychopathology. When subjects are 15, affective function will be assessed at four levels of analysis: 1) brain (with functional MRI to assess activation and connectivity in response to emotional faces and with diffusion tensor imaging to measure structural connectivity); 2) HPA axis (by measuring cortisol in response to a stressor and DHEA); 3) behavior (using an attention bias measure); and 4) self- and parent-report measures of negative affect with follow-up at age 17. Developmental history from FFCWS (economic conditions, symptoms, parenting) will be mapped onto affective function at these four levels of analysis. By leveraging the FFCWS, the team is well positioned to conduct research that integrates experience across childhood with neurobiological and psychological data to better elucidate a major path to psychopathology.