CAREER: Ethnic-racial discrimination influences on neural representation of threat learning in Latina girls: A multivariate modeling approach

Children and adults of Mexican descent in the United States are often exposed to discrimination. Discrimination has negative effects on many physical and mental health outcomes, including stress and anxiety. About one third of teen girls are affected by stress and anxiety, and rates among Latina teens in particular have risen over the last few years.

However, we know little about how mental health problems like anxiety increase over that time and whether they do so by affecting brain development. Latina girls experience many forms of unfair treatment based on race, family and cultural characteristics, and gender, and are therefore at risk for experiencing stress and anxiety. This study examines whether repeated exposure to unfair treatment during the early teenage years affects how Latina girls learn to distinguish threat from safety, and how parents can play a role in protecting their daughters from the harmful effects of discrimination.

The transition between childhood and the early teenage years is an especially important period to study as brain regions related to threat and safety learning are still developing. This study is among the first to include new methods that allow us to compare children’s brain patterns when they view different social and emotional scenes. By using these new methods over time, this research examines how repeated discrimination can affect brain function and lead to anxiety, stress, and feelings of lack of safety.

We focus on the unique experiences of Latina girls growing up in Southern California and their parents, who are shaped by their cultural identities and their experiences of discrimination. Doing so leads to a better understanding of community health and brain development, and it informs more effective practices and policies that address the needs of families across the region and the country.

Ethnic-racial discrimination—defined as differential treatment of individuals on the grounds of ethnic or racial group membership, is a salient reality and threat for minoritized youth. The immigration policy contexts and the discourse around it has heightened Latinxs’ experiences with ethnic-racial discrimination and an overwhelming majority of Latinx individuals report being subjected to unfair treatment based on their ethnic background.

When a child experiences ethnic-racial discrimination, the brain identifies it as a stressor requiring immediate response, but over time, it also becomes a learned process that creates anticipation and heightened threat vigilance towards possible future exposures. For minoritized youth, little is known about how mental health problems like anxiety accumulate over that time and whether they do so by altering trajectories of brain development.

A nascent literature has shown that Latina girls, specifically, demonstrate higher rates of untreated anxiety diagnoses relative to other racial and ethnic groups. The goal of this longitudinal study is to examine neurobiological pathways through which cumulative experiences of ethnic-racial discrimination may be associated with integrity of brain networks that detect and regulate threat responses in Latina girls.

We use latent change score models to identify perceptual and emotional contributions to threat and safety learning in Mexican-identifying Latina girls during late middle childhood and early adolescence via behavior and multivariate neuroimaging, and examine the independent and interactive influence of ethnic-racial discrimination experiences and parental socialization on neural signatures of heightened threat vigilance and overgeneralization—the inaccurate classification of safe stimuli as threatening. The novel conceptualization of threat and safety learning posits that maintaining flexible distinctions between threat and safety without inappropriately attributing threats to non-harmful stimuli, depends on safety representations not only in previously identified emotion neurocircuitry, but also in higher-order visual areas, affecting how a child perceives her environment.

The model also specifies the influence of ethnic-racial discrimination experiences on girls’ neural representations of threat and safety. Understanding how such experiences affect representations of threat and safety is a crucial next step for the science of threat learning in childhood, particularly in this underrepresented population.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.