Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Baskin-Sommers, Arielle

Abstract

A central question motivating developmental research for decades has been how threats in youth’s social environments influence development. In particular, researchers have focused on understanding how threats in different contexts in youth’s social environments increase risk for adverse outcomes and why some youth exposed to threats appear more susceptible to adverse outcomes than others. Increasingly, researchers have identified cognitive and neurobiological factors that are thought to contribute to youth’s susceptibility to threats. Despite these advances, our understanding of the influence of threats on development remains incomplete due to a few critical limitations. Notably, while foundational ecological theories emphasize youth’s social environments as a multicontextual, complex system, most of the research on the influence of threats on development fails to apply this conceptualization or capture the nuance of transactions between youth and their social environments. To advance an empirical foundation that captures the complexity of relations between threats in youth’s social environments and development, the three studies that comprise this dissertation harness an ecological framework–examining multiple contexts, multiple levels of analysis, and multiple outcomes over time. I examine variability in youth’s experiences of threats in their primary social contexts–their neighborhoods, families, and schools–and relations with a range of developmental outcomes. In Study 1, I examine subgroups of youth characterized by variability in threats in their primary social contexts and evaluate longitudinal associations between subgroup membership and mental health, social, and neurocognitive functioning two years later. In Study 2, I estimate the likelihood of youth transitioning from one subgroup characterized by threats in their primary social contexts to another across the transition from childhood to adolescence and investigate associations with emotional and behavioral outcomes. Finally, in Study 3, I evaluate associations between subgroups of youth characterized by threats in their neighborhoods and brain and behavioral correlates of cognitive processing, and test whether neurobiological processing contributes to susceptibility to externalizing problems among youth facing neighborhood threats. Broadly speaking, results from Studies 1 and 2 indicated that variability in where and the extent to which youth experienced threats in their primary social contexts was differentially related to developmental outcomes. Further, results from Study 3 identified executive network processing as a potential marker of neurobiological susceptibility to externalizing among youth with elevated neighborhood threats. Collectively, results from the current dissertation demonstrate the utility of adopting an ecological framework for deepening our understanding of the influence of threats on development.

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