Social Sensitivity and Depression in Peer-Victimized Girls: Insights from Neuroscience

 描述(申请人提供)：同伴受害是早期逆境的一种突出形式，对青少年的心理健康造成长期代价。事实上，研究和媒体报道将同伴受害作为一个关键的公共卫生问题列入国家议程，因为它的普遍存在及其对青春期和成年期的情感福祉的影响。确定这些持久影响的过程对于提供政策和实践信息至关重要，但科学家们 还没有发现受害行为破坏青少年发展的过程--即受害行为如何以灌输长期风险的方式“渗入皮下”。人们越来越认识到早期生活压力对成熟的大脑系统和相关的精神病理学的普遍影响，受此启发，这项研究将通过记录青少年受害的后遗症，为科学知识及其应用做出重大贡献，并对丰富我们对早期逆境塑造应激反应和心理健康的机制的理解具有更广泛的影响。这项研究将发展和社会心理学、社会情感神经科学和发展精神病理学领域的思想与NIMH RDoC框架相结合，研究受害是否与持续威胁/损失涉及的调节失调的负价系统有关，从而提高反应性，损害调节，并导致青少年抑郁。将一种创新的方法论方法引入同伴受害领域，本研究将使用多水平设计，在实验设计(社会威胁/损失的实验室线索)的背景下，检查神经和行为水平上的反应和调节。这项研究将利用现有的青春期女孩(10-11年级)样本，在受害、风险和资源的个体差异以及2-9年级的心理健康方面具有良好的特征，从而提供机会利用全面的纵向数据集来丰富拟议的神经/行为处理和抑郁症状的短期(两年)调查。因此，这项研究在研究儿童受害与随后的社会线索的神经和行为处理之间的联系，以及确定压力反应/调节是否解释受害对青少年抑郁的影响方面具有独特的地位。这项研究还将提供有关风险和复原力过程中的个体差异的新数据，从而最大限度地提高预防/干预计划的效率。最终，预计这项研究将作为更大规模纵向研究的基础，调查：(A)不同背景下的早期逆境如何影响新出现的大脑系统，从而为青少年心理健康问题奠定基础；以及(B)可能缓冲青少年免受这些不利后果影响的个人和背景资源。这一系列研究可以对旨在尽量减少早期社会逆境对青年健康和发展构成的威胁的政策和实践指导方针产生明确和令人信服的影响，并可能对长期适应和社会负担产生影响。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Peer victimization is a salient form of early adversity with long-term costs for youths' mental health. Indeed, research and media coverage place peer victimization on the national agenda as a critical public health issue, given its prevalence and it implications for emotional well-being into adolescence and adulthood. Identifying processes accounting for these enduring effects is critical for informing policy and practice, yet scientists have not yet discovered the processes through which victimization derails youths' development-that is, how victimization "gets under the skin" in ways that instill long-term risk. Inspired by a growing recognition of the pervasive impact of early life stress on maturing brain systems and associated psychopathology, this research will contribute substantially to scientific knowledge and its application by documenting the adolescent sequelae of victimization, with broader implications for enriching our understanding of the mechanisms through which early adversity shapes stress reactivity and mental health. Integrating ideas across the fields of developmental and social psychology, social affective neuroscience, and developmental psychopathology with the NIMH RDoC framework, this research will examine whether victimization is linked to dysregulated negative valence systems involved in sustained threat/loss, thereby heightening reactivity and compromising regulation and contributing to adolescent depression. Introducing an innovative methodological approach into the field of peer victimization, this research will use a multi-level design, examining reactivity and regulation at both the neural and behavioral levels in the context of an experimental design (laboratory cues of social threat/loss). This study will take advantage of an existing sample of adolescent girls (10th-11th graders), well-characterized on victimization, individual differences in risks and resources, and mental health from 2nd-9th grade, thereby providing the opportunity to leverage a comprehensive longitudinal data set to enrich the proposed short-term (two-year) investigation of neural/behavioral processing and depressive symptoms. Thus, this study is uniquely positioned to examine the link between childhood victimization and subsequent neural and behavioral processing of social cues as well as to determine whether stress reactivity/regulation account for the contribution of victimization to adolescent depression. This research also will provide novel data on individual differences in risk and resilience processes, thereby maximizing the efficiency of prevention/intervention programs. Ultimately, it is anticipated that this researc will serve as a basis for larger longitudinal studies investigating: (a) how early adversity withina variety of contexts influences emerging brain systems in ways that set the stage for adolescent mental health problems; and (b) individual and contextual resources that may buffer youth against these adverse consequences. This line of research can yield clear and compelling implications for policy and practice guidelines aimed at minimizing the threat posed by early social adversity to youths' health and development, with potential implications for long-term adaptation and societal burden.