Poster #8 - What’s the harm?: Examining the link between police contact and amygdala function among Black adolescents

• In Event: Poster Session 01

Abstract

Childhood adversity significantly shapes youth outcomes. Existing literature demonstrates that threatening adverse experiences predict heightened amygdala reactivity during socioemotional processing (McLaughlin et al., 2019). However, this growing literature has not considered experiences unique to Black youth despite their inordinate exposure to adversity due to racism in the broader social environment (Bernard et al., 2020). The proposed project will address this gap by investigating police contact–one form of adversity disproportionately experienced by Black adolescents. Police contact is associated with poorer mental and physical health outcomes among adolescents (McFarland et al., 2019).

We seek to examine the potential biological embedding of one aspect of structural racism by exploring police contact and amygdala function. The proposed project will also examine whether police contact contributes to differences in race-related amygdala function. The in-group vs out-group hypothesis holds that participants exhibit greater amygdala response when viewing emotional faces from members of their own ethnic-racial background (Chiao et al., 2008). However, this explanation has been consistently challenged by evidence showing that White participants exhibit greater amygdala response when viewing Black emotional faces than when viewing White emotional faces (Phelps et al., 2000). The proposed study seeks to clarify these inconsistent findings by examining whether police contact changes patterns in amygdala response to Black and White emotional faces among Black youth.

We will test our research questions in a subsample of 131 Black adolescents from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study (FFCWS), a birth-cohort, longitudinal study which oversampled for lower-income families. At age 15, adolescents participated in fMRI during an event-related emotional faces task and provided a self-report of police contact. We hypothesize that: (H1) Police contact will be positively associated with amygdala reactivity to threat (angry and fearful faces), (H2) Individuals who witness police contact of others (i.e., vicarious contact) will exhibit amygdala reactivity comparable to those who directly experience contact, (H3) Amygdala activation will moderate the association between police contact and health outcomes (i.e., anxiety, depression, self-report of physical health). We will take an exploratory approach to investigate patterns in amygdala response to Black and White emotional faces among Black youth. We will analyze these data using the GLM of SPM12 while controlling for birth city, gender, poverty ratio, pubertal status, anti-social behavior, parental incarceration, and composite scores of threat and deprivation exposure (Hein et al., 2020).

This submission will advance knowledge on how social context shapes brain development, while expanding this literature to consider how aspects of structural racism impact brain development among marginalized youth. This work aligns with several SRCD topics including biological processes and race, ethnicity, culture, context.

Authors

• Deaweh Benson, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
  Presenting Author

• Vonnie C McLoyd, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Heidi Westerman

• Nestor Lopez-Duran, University of Michigan

• Colter Mitchell, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Christopher S Monk, University of Michigan

• Luke W. Hyde, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor