Resilience may be neurobiological
Neighborhood violence has been associated with adverse health effects on youth, including sleep loss, asthma and metabolic syndrome. Yet some youth living in high-crime neighborhoods manage to avoid these effects.
A new Northwestern University study aims to answer a resilience puzzle: Why does a second-hand or indirect experience of neighborhood violence affect some youth, but not others?
“Little is known about the brain networks that are involved in shaping these different outcomes, a problem we pursue here,” said Gregory E. Miller, lead author of the study and professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern.
“Like previous studies, we find that youth living in neighborhoods with high levels of violence have worse cardiometabolic health than peers from safer communities,” said Miller, also a faculty fellow with the University’s Institute for Policy Research. “Extending this knowledge, we show this connection is absent for youth who display higher connectivity within the brain’s frontoparietal central executive network (CEN), which facilitates efforts of self-control as well as reinterpretation of threatening events and suppression of unwanted emotional imagery.”
Drawing on knowledge of the brain’s intrinsic functional architecture, the researchers predicted that individual differences in resting-state connectivity would help explain variability in the strength of the association between neighborhood violence and cardiometabolic health.