The Role of Ethnic Racial Discrimination on the Development of Anxious Hypervigilance in Latina Youth - 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.
