Background: Social skill is a critical asset for adolescents, and early mother-child attachment is an essential contributor to their development. While less secure mother-child attachment is a known risk factor for adolescent social development, the protective factor of neighborhood context in buffering this risk is still not well understood. Research Design: This study used longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study ( n = 1,876). Adolescent social skills (at age 15) were examined as a function of early attachment security and neighborhood social cohesion (age 3). Results: Children with higher mother-child attachment security at age three had higher adolescent social skills at age 15. The findings show that there was an interaction effect such that neighborhood social cohesion buffered the relationship between mother-child attachment security and adolescent social skills. Conclusion: Our study highlights that early mother-child attachment security can be promotive for cultivating adolescent social skills. Furthermore, neighborhood social cohesion can be protective among children with lower mother-child attachment security.

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Accumulating literature has linked poverty to brain structure and function, particularly in affective neural regions; however, few studies have examined associations with structural connections or the importance of developmental timing of exposure. Moreover, prior neuroimaging studies have not used a proximal measure of poverty (i.e., material hardship, which assesses food, housing, and medical insecurity) to capture the lived experience of growing up in harsh economic conditions. The present investigation addressed these gaps collectively by examining the associations between material hardship (ages 1, 3, 5, 9, and 15 years) and white matter connectivity of frontolimbic structures (age of 15 years) in a low-income sample. We applied probabilistic tractography to diffusion imaging data collected from 194 adolescents. Results showed that material hardship related to amygdala–prefrontal, but not hippocampus–prefrontal or hippocampus–amygdala, white matter connectivity. Specifically, hardship during middle childhood (ages 5 and 9 years) was associated with greater connectivity between the amygdala and dorsomedial pFC, whereas hardship during adolescence (age of 15 years) was related to reduced amygdala–orbitofrontal (OFC) and greater amygdala–subgenual ACC connectivity. Growth curve analyses showed that greater increases of hardship across time were associated with both greater (amygdala–subgenual ACC) and reduced (amygdala–OFC) white matter connectivity. Furthermore, these effects remained above and beyond other types of adversity, and greater hardship and decreased amygdala–OFC connectivity were related to increased anxiety and depressive symptoms. Results demonstrate that the associations between material hardship and white matter connections differ across key prefrontal regions and developmental periods, providing support for potential windows of plasticity for structural circuits that support emotion processing.

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Out of 237 youths who participated in the SAND study at baseline, 16 declined to participate in MRI scanning, 3 exceeded MRI table weight limit, 1 reported a medical restriction, 7 had braces or other metal in body, 1 had a risk of pregnancy, and 2 were excluded for diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder. After these exclusions, of 207 youths who participated in MRI scanning, 5 did not finish scan, 6 had significant artifacts in structural anatomical MRI data, 5 was excluded for significant motion artifacts in the functional data, and 17 had accuracy below 70% on fMRI task. The final sample used for time-series extraction and subsequent analyses was 174. See Figure S1 for illustration. MRI data acquisition and preprocessingMRIs were acquired using 3T GEDiscovery MR750 scanner with 8-channel head coil. Head padding and instructions limited movement. T1-weighted gradient echo images were first captured (TR=12ms, TE=5ms, TI=500ms, flip angle=15, FOV=26cm, slice thickness=1.44mm, 256x192 matrix, 110 slices). fMRI T2*-weighted blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) images were then captured using reverse spiral sequence (Glover & Law, 2001) of 40 contiguous axial 3mm slices (TR=2000ms, TE=30ms, flip angle=90, FOV=22cm, voxel size=3.44x3.44x3mm, ascending acquisition, parallel to AC-PC line). Anatomical images were skull-stripped (f=.25) using Brain Extraction Tool (BET) in FSL version 6.0 (Jenkinson et al., 2012) and segmented into gray matter, white matter, and cerebrospinal fluid using FSL FAST.After large temporal spikes in the k-space functional data (>2 SD) were removed, field maps