Charting neurocognitive impairments and strengths following ecological adversity across adolescence: Implications for multisystem health and wellbeing

The purpose of this research is to transform current approaches to the study of adversity effects on adolescent development by integrating community-based participatory research methods with clinical and developmental neuroscience. Departing from past research that principally aims to identify adversity-associated impairments in behavior, brain function, and health and wellbeing, this project also seeks to characterize the skills and capacities that may be enhanced or remain in-tact among adversity-exposed youth that may undergird resilience to adversity. Focusing on one potent form of adversity – exposure to community violence – this project uses longitudinal repeated measures data (N = 99 9-11-year-olds, measured annually four times) to test the overall hypothesis that adolescents who experience high community violence will demonstrate larger improvements over time on tasks that measure “stress-adapted skills” (e.g., shifting attention quickly) than tasks that measure “safe-adapted skills” (e.g., sustaining attention for a long period of time). By contrast, youth with low exposure to community violence will not demonstrate such maturational pace differences by task. Adversity-driven differences in the pace of development will be observed at the levels of brain and behavior and will be associated with a range of multisystem indicators of health and wellbeing across adolescence. The in-lab longitudinal study of adolescent neurodevelopment will be bolstered by three community-driven studies: 1) a population-based household survey to 5,000 randomly-sampled addresses in target neighborhoods that residents will help to develop and analyze, 2) adult and youth advisory boards will monitor study progress and work with the study team to analyze data and develop dissemination plans, and 3) a summer youth participatory action research project that will educate and empower adolescents to design their own research questions about how the environment shapes wellbeing, and to develop ideas for creating strengths-based interventions. All studies center on the experiences of racial-ethnic minorities, who face disproportionate exposure to community violence and increasing health disparities. Understanding both the adaptations and impairments that result from childhood adversity and the brain-based mechanisms of these developmental trajectories, is sorely needed to develop effective strengths-based interventions that promote adolescent health and wellbeing. This project has been submitted as both an NSF CAREER award (cross-sectional behavioral data, focused on cognitive and academic outcomes) and a NIH New Investigator or DP2 (longitudinal brain and behavioral data, focus on multisystem health and wellbeing) award.