Civilian Moral Injury and Amygdala Functional Connectivity During Attention to Threat.

BACKGROUND: Moral injury references emotional and spiritual/existential suffering that may emerge following psychological trauma. Despite being linked to adverse mental health outcomes, little is known about the neurophysiological mechanisms of this phenomenon. In this study, we examined neural correlates of moral injury exposure and distress using the Moral Injury Exposure and Symptom Scale for Civilians. We also examined potential moderation of these effects by race (Black vs. White individuals) given the likely intersection of race-related stress with moral injury. METHODS: Forty-eight adults ages 18 to 65 years (mean age = 30.56, SD = 11.93) completed the Moral Injury Exposure and Symptom Scale for Civilians and an affective attentional control measure, the affective Stroop task (AS), during functional magnetic resonance imaging; the AS includes presentation of threat-relevant and neutral distractor stimuli. Voxelwise functional connectivity of the bilateral amygdala was examined in response to threat-relevant versus neutral AS distractor trials. RESULTS: Functional connectivity between the right amygdala and left postcentral gyrus/primary somatosensory cortex was positively correlated with the Moral Injury Exposure and Symptom Scale for Civilians exposure score (voxelwise p < .001, cluster false discovery rate-corrected p < .05) in response to threat versus neutral AS distractor trials. Follow-up analyses revealed significant effects of race; Black but not White participants demonstrated this significant pattern of amygdala-left somatosensory cortex connectivity. CONCLUSIONS: Increased exposure to potentially morally injurious events may lead to emotion-somatosensory pathway disruptions during attention to threat-relevant stimuli. These effects may be most potent for individuals who have experienced multilayered exposure to morally injurious events, including racial trauma. Moral injury appears to have a distinct neurobiological signature that involves abnormalities in connectivity of emotion-somatosensory paths, which may be amplified by race-related stress.

Contributions of Trauma and Economic Insecurity to Psychological Distress in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Background: Racially minoritized women with limited socioeconomic resources are at increased risk for adverse psychological outcomes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Disproportionate rates of trauma exposure and economic insecurity likely heighten risk for these outcomes among socioeconomically vulnerable individuals, but the unique contributions of these factors are poorly understood. As such, we examined trauma and economic factors as predictors of pandemic-related psychological distress and symptoms. Methods: Ninety-six women recruited for a trauma research study (91.7% Black, Mage=38.3 years, SDage=11.8 years) completed measures of trauma exposure, economic insecurity, and several items assessing psychological distress and symptoms related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We examined concern for mental and physical health impacts of COVID-19 as well as changes in self-reported levels of anxiety and anhedonia from the three months prior to the pandemic to the past two weeks. Linear regression analyses were used to assess contributions of trauma exposure and economic insecurity to COVID-19-related distress. Results: Childhood maltreatment and lifetime trauma exposure did not predict COVID-19-related distress; however, financial concern significantly contributed to concern for the physical health impact of COVID-19 (B = .30, p < .05). Food insecurity emerged as the only significant predictor of concern for mental health impact of COVID-19 (B=.91, p < .01). Housing instability was the only significant predictor of COVID-19-related increases in anhedonia (B = -.30, p < .05). Conclusions: Economic insecurity, namely self-reported financial concern, food insecurity, and housing instability, was related to COVID-19-related psychological distress in a sample of predominately Black American women living in under-resourced communities. Findings may help identify populations at risk for COVID-19-related psychological distress and symptoms and develop effective interventions, such as expanding access to nutritious food sources and housing support, for minoritized community members.

Racial discrimination associates with lower cingulate cortex thickness in trauma-exposed black women.

Racial discrimination (RD) has been consistently linked to adverse brain health outcomes. These may be due in part to RD effects on neural networks involved with threat appraisal and regulation; RD has been linked to altered activity in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) and structural decrements in the anterior cingulum bundle and hippocampus. In the present study, we examined associations of RD with cingulate, hippocampus and amygdala gray matter morphology in a sample of trauma-exposed Black women. Eighty-one Black women aged 19-62 years were recruited as part of an ongoing study of trauma. Participants completed assessments of RD, trauma exposure, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and underwent T1-weighted anatomical imaging. Cortical thickness, surface area and gray matter volume were extracted from subregions of cingulate cortex, and gray matter volume was extracted from amygdala and hippocampus, and entered into partial correlation analyses that included RD and other socio-environmental variables. After correction for multiple comparisons and accounting for variance associated with other stressors and socio-environmental factors, participants with more RD exposure showed proportionally lower cortical thickness in the left rACC, caudal ACC, and posterior cingulate cortex (ps < = 0.01). These findings suggest that greater experiences of RD are linked to compromised cingulate gray matter thickness. In the context of earlier findings indicating that RD produces increased response in threat neurocircuitry, our data suggest that RD may increase vulnerability for brain health problems via cingulate cortex alterations. Further research is needed to elucidate biological mechanisms for these changes.

How statistical learning interacts with the socioeconomic environment to shape children's language development.

Language is acquired in part through statistical learning abilities that encode environmental regularities. Language development is also heavily influenced by social environmental factors such as socioeconomic status. However, it is unknown to what extent statistical learning interacts with SES to affect language outcomes. We measured event-related potentials in 26 children aged 8-12 while they performed a visual statistical learning task. Regression analyses indicated that children's learning performance moderated the relationship between socioeconomic status and both syntactic and vocabulary language comprehension scores. For children demonstrating high learning, socioeconomic status had a weaker effect on language compared to children showing low learning. These results suggest that high statistical learning ability can provide a buffer against the disadvantages associated with being raised in a lower socioeconomic status household.

Distinct neural networks for detecting violations of adjacent versus nonadjacent sequential dependencies: An fMRI study.

The ability to learn and process sequential dependencies is essential for language acquisition and other cognitive domains. Recent studies suggest that the learning of adjacent (e.g., "A-B") versus nonadjacent (e.g., "A-X-B") dependencies have different cognitive demands, but the neural correlates accompanying such processing are currently underspecified. We developed a sequential learning task in which sequences of printed nonsense syllables containing both adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies were presented. After incidentally learning these grammatical sequences, twenty-one healthy adults (age M = 22.1, 12 females) made familiarity judgments about novel grammatical sequences and ungrammatical sequences containing violations of the adjacent or nonadjacent structure while in a 3T MRI scanner. Violations of adjacent dependencies were associated with increased BOLD activation in both posterior (lateral occipital and angular gyrus) as well as frontal regions (e.g., medial frontal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus). Initial results indicated no regions showing significant BOLD activations for the violations of nonadjacent dependencies. However, when using a less stringent cluster threshold, exploratory analyses revealed that violations of nonadjacent dependencies were associated with increased activation in subcallosal cortex, paracingulate cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Finally, when directly comparing the adjacent condition to the nonadjacent condition, we found significantly greater levels of activation for the right superior lateral occipital cortex (BA 19) for the adjacent relative to nonadjacent condition. In sum, the detection of violations of adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies appear to involve distinct neural networks, with perceptual brain regions mediating the processing of adjacent but not nonadjacent dependencies. These results are consistent with recent proposals that statistical-sequential learning is not a unified construct but depends on the interaction of multiple neurocognitive mechanisms acting together.