About this session

Thursday, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

Adolescent Development in Context: Effects of Neighborhood and Ecological Environments on Brain and Mental Health

Adolescence is a period marked by heightened biological stress reactivity and an increased risk of mental health problems. It is important to understand how adolescents’ experiences in their surrounding environments, including neighborhood and broader ecological contexts, shape their health and development. This symposium takes an integrative approach, examining the topic from multiple perspectives using national and regional datasets, objective and subjective measures of neighborhood and ecological contexts, and interviews, surveys, and neuroimaging methodologies.

Using a mixed-method design, Paper 1 investigated adolescent and caregiver perceptions of neighborhood factors that influence adolescent health and well-being, and quantified the relative contributions of social and physical neighborhood factors. Paper 2 extends this exploration by comparing the impact of neighborhood cohesion on mental health outcomes across urban and rural settings, highlighting the protective role of neighborhood cohesion against adversity.

Moving beyond the neighborhood context, Paper 3 used person-centered approaches to explore patterns of adversity in multiple ecological contexts (e.g., family, community, neighborhood) and their neurodevelopmental consequences, highlighting individual differences that contribute to heterogeneity in mental health. Finally, Paper 4 further deepens this line of inquiry by understanding the longitudinal brain mechanism linking ecological stress and adolescent mental health, highlighting how experiences of ecological stress can “get embedded into the brain”.

Together, these studies provide a nuanced understanding of how environments – from neighborhoods to broader ecological contexts – shape adolescent mental health, and the underlying neurodevelopmental mechanisms. These insights have important implications for developing targeted interventions and policies aimed at promoting healthy development in diverse populations.

Paper #1
Title	Shaped by the city: A mixed methods investigation of neighborhood factors for adolescent mental health
Presenting author	Deena Ahmad Shariq, University of Maryland, College Park, United States

Paper #2
Title	Protective role of community cohesion across rural and urban contexts: Implications for youth mental health
Presenting author	Alexis Brieant, Ph.D., University of Vermont, United States

Paper #3
Title	Parsing heterogeneity in mental health and neural correlates of multi-context adverse experiences using person-oriented approaches
Presenting author	Felicia A. Hardi, PhD, Yale University, United States

Paper #4
Title	Accelerated development of corticolimbic circuitry as short-term adaptation mechanism to ecological stress
Presenting author	Tianying Cai, Ph.D., University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, United States

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Session chair
Tianying Cai, Ph.D., University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, United States

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