Project Summary/Abstract
Threat vigilance facilitates adaptive defensive responses and is advantageous in the case of real threats.
However, when extreme and persistent, it can result in excessive fear and avoidance, core features of anxiety.
Theoretical models of anxiety posit that hypervigilance towards threat may elicit, maintain, or even exacerbate
anxiety symptoms. Indeed, relative to healthy participants, anxiety patients show greater psychophysiological
responding and dysregulated neurocircuit function in many threat-anticipatory states. Whether and how such
perturbations are impacted by threat-relevant psychosocial factors, such as ethnic-racial (ER) discrimination
and ER socialization, is less well understood, particularly in adolescence when anxiety risk is elevated. To
address this gap in knowledge, the current proposal builds on an existing longitudinal study to examine the
social experiences that exacerbate anxious hypervigilance in preadolescent Latina girls aged 8-13 years, a
group exhibiting high levels of untreated anxiety that is also differentially and excessively exposed to ER
discrimination. The specific aims of this proposal are (1) to understand the effect of ER discrimination on
behavioral and neurophysiological indices of anxious hypervigilance in Latina girls, and (2) to explore main and
moderating effects of parental ER socialization on anxious hypervigilance and the association between ER
discrimination and anxious hypervigilance, respectively. Anxious hypervigilance will be assessed during two
task-based measures via social judgements of emotionally ambiguous face stimuli, sympathetic and
parasympathetic responses, and neural activity. Child anxiety symptoms, ER discrimination, and parental ER
socialization will be assessed via survey-based measures. In sum, through this project, I will explore possible
longitudinal, biological, and social sequelae of ER discrimination and ER socialization, characterize parental
ER socialization practices as potential protective factors, enhance my knowledge of neurophysiological and
longitudinal data analysis, and contribute to culturally-informed intervention and prevention efforts aimed at
reducing anxiety in minoritized youth.
