Identifying Risk and Protective Factors of Latinx American Youth’s Internalizing Symptoms: A Biopsychosocial Approach

• In Event: Longitudinal Examinations of Biological and Social Contextual Factors: Predictions to Adolescent Anxiety and Depression

Abstract

Latinx American youth can be at risk for mental health symptoms due to challenges associated with discrimination, lower socioeconomic status, and acculturative stress. For example, Latinx American youth have much higher rates of mental health symptoms compared to their European American counterparts (Alegría et al., 2008; Santacrose et al., 2021). At the same time, enormous variability among Latinx American youth raises the question as to what risk and protective factors are associated with Latinx American youth’s mental health development.

Past studies suggest that youth’s brain development (e.g., hyper-reactivity in the amygdala, Shackman et al., 2016; Swartz et al., 2015) and parents’ internalizing symptoms (van Santvoort et al., 2015; Sweeney et al., 2016) are risk factors for youth’s mental health. As for protective factors, parents’ familism values (i.e., emphasis on family support, family obligation, and viewing family as a referent) have been found to be protective factors for mental health among Latinx American youth (White et al., 2012, 2015; Zeiders et al., 2016). Therefore, the current study took an integrative biopsychosocial approach to systematically examine how biological (i.e., amygdala activity to negative social stimuli) and psychosocial (i.e., parents’ mental health and familism values) factors are uniquely associated with Latinx American youth’s mental health over time.

This pre-registered study (https://aspredicted.org/48K_3CM) obtained data from baseline (T1) and one-year follow-up (T2) of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. Following the MRI quality control procedure, 1520 Latinx American youth (mean age = 9.93 years; 50% girls) and their primary caregivers (90% mothers) were included. During fMRI scanning at T1, youth completed the Emotional n-back task, an fMRI paradigm that has an emotional perception component. Given our interest in neural reactivity to negative social stimuli, we focused on youth’s amygdala activation to fearful vs. neutral faces in this task. At T1, parents reported on their internalizing symptoms and familism values. At both T1 and T2, parents reported on youth’s internalizing symptoms.

Using mixed-effect models, our analyses examined whether youth’s internalizing symptoms at T2 were uniquely predicted by youth’s amygdala activation to fearful faces, parents’ internalizing symptoms, and parents’ familism values at T1 by including these predictors simultaneously in the same model, controlling for youth’s internalizing symptoms at T1 and other covariates. As shown in the Model 1 of Table 1, youth’s left amygdala activation to fearful faces predicted increased internalizing symptoms over time (β = .04, p = .04) with a similar, albeit nonsignificant association for youth’s right amygdala activation (β = .03, p = .08) (Model 2 of Table 1). Moreover, parents’ internalizing symptoms predicted increased internalizing symptoms among youth over time (β = .12, p < .001), and parents’ familism values predicted reduced internalizing symptoms among youth over time (β = -.04, p = .04). Additional moderation analyses suggest that there was no significant interaction effect between any two predictors in predicting youth’s internalizing symptoms.

Our findings underscore the contributions of neurobiological and psychosocial factors in the development of internalizing symptoms, providing a new biopsychosocial perspective on Latinx American youth’s mental health.

Authors

• Beiming Yang, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author

• Zachary Anderson, Northwestern University

• Zexi Zhou, University of Texas at Austin

• Claudia Haase, Northwestern University

• Yang Qu, Northwestern University