The Impact of Neighborhood Disadvantage on Amygdala Reactivity: Pathways Through Neighborhood Social Processes

Description: Youth growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods are more likely than their advantaged peers to face negative developmental outcomes, including lower academic achievement and greater mental health and behavioral problems. Although studies have shown that adversity can undermine positive development via its impact on the developing brain, few studies have examined the association between neighborhood disadvantage and neural function, and no study has investigated potential social mechanisms within the neighborhood that might link neighborhood disadvantage to altered neural function. The current study evaluates the association between neighborhood disadvantage and amygdala reactivity during socioemotional face processing. We also assessed whether and which neighborhood-level social processes are related to amygdala reactivity, and whether these social processes mediate the association between neighborhood disadvantage and altered amygdala reactivity. For completeness, in supplementary materials, a whole-brain analysis was conducted and reported for the two planned contrasts: anger and fear > shapes and neutral > shapes. We examined these aims in a registered report, using a sample of twins aged 7-19 years (N=354 families, 708 twins) recruited from birth records with enrichment for neighborhood disadvantage. Twins completed a socioemotional face processing fMRI task and a sample of unrelated participants from the twins’ neighborhoods were also recruited to serve as informants on neighborhood social processes. We found that neighborhood disadvantage, but not neighborhood social processes, was associated with greater amygdala reactivity to socioemotional faces. Exploratory whole brain analyses revealed that neighborhood collective efficacy was related to greater reactivity in the left precentral gyrus and left precuneus in response to angry and fearful faces and related to less reactivity in the left and right fusiform gyrus in response to neutral faces. Lastly, we found that neighborhood norms were associated with greater reactivity in the right precentral gyrus in response to angry and fearful faces. Taken together, our results provide evidence that the neighborhood context impacts brain function during socioemotional processing, though several hypothesized associations between neighborhood social processes and amygdala reactivity were not supported.

Communities: developmental