Executive and Emotion Regulation Networks Associated with Resilience to Poverty and Early Adversity

Talk 3 in the CNS 2020 Virtual symposium Finances and Feelings: The Affective Neuroscience of SES Robin Nusslock, Northwestern University

Abstract:
Individuals exposed to early-life adversity, including being raised in a
family of low socioeconomic status, are vulnerable to emotional and
physical problems across the lifespan. However, not everyone
exposed to adversity is affected, which raises an important question:
what enables some to remain healthy whereas others deteriorate? We
first test the hypothesis that heightened activity in the brain’s central
executive network (CEN), which regulates emotions and limbic
reactivity, might reflect a neurobiological marker of resilience. We
enrolled 218 urban youth and characterized their exposure to
neighborhood violence. Cardiometabolic health and resting state
functional connectivity (rsFC) were assessed. As expected, higher
neighborhood violence was associated with greater cardiometabolic
problems, but only among individuals who displayed lower rsFC in the
CEN. We next examined whether receiving supportive parenting
during adolescence helps strengthen connectivity in the CEN and an
emotion regulation network (ERN) while growing up in poverty. In a
sample of African Americans (N = 119) living in the rural South, poverty
status and receipt of supportive parenting were assessed during
adolescence and rsFC was assessed using fMRI at age 25. As
predicted, more years spent living in poverty presaged less CEN and
ERN rsFC among young adults who received low levels of supportive
parenting, but not among those who received high levels of such
parenting. Collectively this suggests that heightened central executive
and emotion regulation tendencies may help protect individuals from
the consequences of early-life adversity and that supportive parenting
can help foster these tendencies in the face of such adversity.

Видео Executive and Emotion Regulation Networks Associated with Resilience to Poverty and Early Adversity канала Cognitive Neuroscience Society