Associations among Household and Neighborhood Socioeconomic Disadvantages, Resting-state Frontoamygdala Connectivity, and Internalizing Symptoms in Youth

摘要

Exposure to socioeconomic disadvantages (SED) can havenegative impacts on mental health, yet SED are a multifacetedconstruct and the precise processes by which SED confer deleteriouseffects are less clear. Using a large and diverse sample ofpreadolescents (ages 9–10 years at baseline, n = 4038, 49female) from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive DevelopmentStudy, we examined associations among SED at both household(i.e., income–needs and material hardship) and neighborhood(i.e., area deprivation and neighborhood unsafety) levels,frontoamygdala resting-state functional connectivity, and internalizingsymptoms at baseline and 1-year follow-up. SED werepositively associated with internalizing symptoms at baselineand indirectly predicted symptoms 1 year later through elevatedsymptoms at baseline. At the household level, youth inhouseholds characterized by higher disadvantage (i.e., lowerincome-to-needs ratio) exhibited more strongly negativefrontoamygdala coupling, particularly between the bilateralamygdala and medial OFC (mOFC) regions within the frontoparietalnetwork. Although more strongly positive amygdala–mOFC coupling was associated with higher levels of internalizingsymptoms at baseline and 1-year follow-up, it did not mediate theassociation between income-to-needs ratio and internalizingsymptoms. However, at the neighborhood level, amygdala–mOFC functional coupling moderated the effect of neighborhooddeprivation on internalizing symptoms. Specifically,higher neighborhood deprivation was associated with higherinternalizing symptoms for youth with more strongly positiveconnectivity, but not for youth with more strongly negative connectivity,suggesting a potential buffering effect. Findings highlightthe importance of capturing multilevel socioecologicalcontexts in which youth develop to identify youth who are mostlikely to benefit from early interventions.