Consequences of poverty and community crime exposure on Mexican-American adolescents’ mental health

• In Event: 1-151 - Beyond stress: Identifying specific pathways linking childhood adversity and mental health

Integrative Statement

Children and adolescents who experience significant adversity are at greater risk for developing mental health problems (Kessler et al., 2010). McLaughlin and Sheridan (2016) suggest that threat and deprivation make up distinct dimensions of adverse experiences with different impacts on emotional and cognitive functioning across development. Specifically, deprivation is thought to relate to cognitive types of dysfunction, whereas threat exposure is thought to affect emotional health (McLaughlin & Sheridan, 2016). In this study, we investigated the effects poverty, a complex form of adversity associated with both deprivation and threat, and community crime, a form of threat frequently associated with poverty, on Mexican-American adolescents’ anxiety and disruptive behavior symptoms. We expected that community crime would predict later psychopathology characterized by emotion dysfunction and would mediate the effects of poverty.
674 Mexican-American adolescents (50% female) and at least one parent were assessed annually when adolescents were between the ages of 10 and 17. Parents reported on family income, household roster and neighborhood crime, and adolescents reported on neighborhood crime, school crime, anxiety symptoms, and disruptive behaviors symptoms. A measure of community crime at each wave was operationalized as the mean of parent-reported neighborhood crime, adolescent-reported neighborhood crime, and adolescent-reported school crime. Poverty was operationalized using income-to-needs ratio. Panel models using maximum likelihood estimation, were used to evaluate the longitudinal relations between deprivation, threat, and mental health symptoms. Separate models were evaluated for general anxiety and disruptive behavior problems. A regression path was also included from income-to-needs ratio at waves 1, 3, 5, and 7 to concurrent community crime to test the indirect path between income-to-needs ratio and psychopathology symptoms at the following wave, through concurrent threat. A significant indirect path would suggest mediation.
For anxiety symptoms (Figure 3A) the model had good fit (χ2=79.892, df = 87, p=.693. RMSEA = .000. SRMR = .021. CFI =1.000). For disruptive behavior symptoms (Figure 3B) the model had acceptable fit (χ2=157.547, df = 87, p<.001. RMSEA = .035. SRMR = .036. CFI =.989). Community crime but not poverty predicted anxiety at ages 13 and 14 (Figure 3A) and disruptive behaviors at ages 11 (Figure 3B), 13, 14, 15, and 16. Income-to-needs ratio was significantly related to concurrent community crime at wave 1 and 7. Although there was not a significant direct effect of income-to-needs ratio on either anxiety or disruptive behavior, there was a significant indirect effect of income-to-needs ratio at wave 1 on disruptive behavior (B = -.059, S.E. = .026, β = -.016), mediated by wave 1 community crime, such that lower income-to-needs ratio was associated with higher levels of community crime, and higher levels of community crime were associated with more symptoms of disruptive behavior.
Overall, this study provides strong support that threat exposure as measured by crime in Mexican-American youths’ school and neighborhood environments are potent predictors of later emotion dysfunction across adolescence. These effects are observed in relation to both anxiety and disruptive behavior, and support the idea that threat, an overarching dimension of adversity, increases risk for emotion dysfunction.

Authors

• David Gerrick Weissman, Harvard University
  Presenting Author

• Paul Hastings, University of California, Davis
  Non-Presenting Author

• Richard W. Robins, University of California, Davis
  Non-Presenting Author

• Amanda Guyer, University of California, Davis
  Non-Presenting Author