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.

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.

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.

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.

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.