Adolescent Externalizing Problems: Contributions of Community Crime Exposure and Neural Function During Emotion Introspection in Mexican‐Origin Youth

Abstract

Models of the etiology of adolescent antisocial behavior suggest that externalizing problems may reflect a susceptibility to crime exposure and a diminished capacity for emotion introspection. In this study, adolescents of Mexican origin completed a neuroimaging task that involved rating their subjective feelings of sadness in response to emotional facial expressions or a nonemotional aspect of each face. At lower levels of neural activity during sadness introspection in posterior cingulate and left temporoparietal junction, and in left amygdala, brain regions involved in mentalizing and emotion, respectively, a stronger positive association between community crime exposure and externalizing problems was found. The specification of emotion introspection as a psychological process showing neural variation may help inform targeted interventions to positively affect adolescent behavior.

Direct replication of task‐dependent neural activation patterns during sadness introspection in two independent adolescent samples

“…Using a region of interest (ROI) approach, we have shown that dorsomedial (dmPFC) activity during sadness introspection when viewing sad faces was related to depression severity 1 year later and to self‐reported emotion regulation (Vilgis et al, ). We have also found that stronger activation of social–emotional processing regions (i.e., the PCC, left TPJ, and left amygdala) during sadness introspection, regardless of facial expression, moderated the relation between community crime exposure and disruptive behavior problems (Weissman et al, ). In accordance with this previous research, our first hypothesis of the present study was that engaging in sadness introspection (explicit emotion processing) would induce specific patterns of neural activity in social–emotional processing and DMN regions, including mPFC, precuneus, and temporal regions, similar to what other studies have shown.…”

“…Table shows basic demographic characteristics for both samples. Although we have previously published results from analyses using this same fMRI task completed within each sample independently, we have not conducted the same analyses reported in this paper in any of our previous publications for either sample (Vilgis et al, ; Weissman, Gelardi, et al, ; Weissman, Guyer, Ferrer, Robins, & Hastings, ).…”

“…Initially, participants were recruited when they were in fifth grade, drawn at random in two cohorts from school rosters during the 2006–2007 and 2007–2008 school years. About 6 years later, 229 participants (119 males and 110 females) were recruited into a substudy designed to examine neurobiological mechanisms in the etiology of depression (Schriber et al, ; Schriber et al, ; Weissman, Gelardi, et al, ; Weissman, Guyer, Ferrer, Robins, & Hastings, ). Youth with elevated depressive symptoms were oversampled from the CFP parent sample, using counts of adolescents' self‐reported symptoms in ninth grade (Age 14) on the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children‐IV (Shaffer, Fisher, Lucas, Dulcan, & Schwab‐Stone, ) and indicators of elevated severity from the Anhedonic Depression and General Distress subscales of the Mood and Anxiety Symptom Questionnaire (Watson & Clark, ).…”

“…Youth with elevated depressive symptoms were oversampled from the CFP parent sample, using counts of adolescents' self‐reported symptoms in ninth grade (Age 14) on the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children‐IV (Shaffer, Fisher, Lucas, Dulcan, & Schwab‐Stone, ) and indicators of elevated severity from the Anhedonic Depression and General Distress subscales of the Mood and Anxiety Symptom Questionnaire (Watson & Clark, ). At Age 16, 192 participants completed the facial emotion‐processing task during an MRI scan (eight refused to be scanned and 36 did not complete the face task due to time constraints and/or scanner malfunction) (Weissman, Gelardi, et al, ). Of those who completed the scan, exclusion from analyses due to excessive head motion ( n = 34) or poor understanding of the behavioral task (missed responses to >20% trials; n = 2) resulted in a final sample of 156 CFP participants in the current investigation.…”

Tuning of brain–autonomic coupling by prior threat exposure: Implications for internalizing problems in Mexican-origin adolescents

“…As described in other work (Vilgis et al, 2018; Weissman, Gelardi, et al, 2018; Weissman, Guyer, et al, 2018), the emotional faces task (Guyer, Choate, Grimm, Pine, & Keenan, 2011) was used to examine neural responses to facial expressions of emotion while attentional focus was constrained in different ways. Participants viewed 12 sad, 12 angry, 12 happy, and 12 neutral faces portrayed by 48 unique actors.…”