Neighborhood Crime Risk and Racial/Ethnic Differences in Children's Neural Reactivity to Emotional Stimuli.

Abstract

Research has shown that exposure to higher rates of neighborhood disadvantage and contextual threat increases risk for the development of psychopathology in youth, with some evidence that these effects may differ across racial/ethnic groups. Although studies have shown that direct exposure to stress impacts neural responses to threat-relevant stimuli, less is known about how neighborhood characteristics more generally (e.g., living in neighborhood characterized by high crime risk, whether or not the individual directly experiences any crime) may impact children's neural responses to threat. To address this question, we examined links between census-derived indices of neighborhood crime and neural reactivity to emotional stimuli in a sample of 100 children (M_age = 9.64, 54% girls, 65% non-Hispanic White) and whether these differ for children from minority backgrounds compared to non-Hispanic White children. Focusing on the late positive potential (LPP) event-related potential (ERP) component, we examined neural reactivity to threat-relevant stimuli (fearful faces) as well as nonthreat-relevant negative (sad faces) and positive (happy faces) stimuli across low, medium, and high intensities (morph levels). We found that levels of neighborhood crime risk were associated with larger LPP amplitudes for high-intensity fearful, but not happy or sad faces, but only among children from racial/ethnic minority backgrounds. This suggests that levels of crime risk within one's neighborhood may be a more salient stressor for children from minority racial-ethnic groups than for non-Hispanic White children.