Baldwin Way - US grants

People can feel stigmatized and discriminated against for a variety of reasons, including religious expression, political ideology, socioeconomic status, race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Although research has examined the structural implications (economic, educational, healthcare, legal) of high profile judicial decisions for members of stigmatized social groups, very little work has studied the psychological consequences. Perhaps the most high profile social issue currently debated in the courts is whether marriage rights should extend to same-sex couples. This is a complex issue with heartfelt viewpoints expressed by people on both sides. The Supreme Court is currently considering the legality of same-sex marriage bans. This case promises to be a significant moment in American history regardless of the direction of the verdict. Given that many gay and lesbian individuals feel stigmatized by prohibitions against same-sex marriage, the current research is designed to examine the social psychological effects of this ruling (whichever way it turns out) on gay and lesbian individuals and a heterosexual comparison group. Drawing on social psychological theories of stigma and discrimination, a mediational model will be tested in which the court ruling may lead to changes in well-being by shifting individuals' perceptions of their stigmatized identity and subjective feelings of discrimination-related stress. The knowledge gained from this research will contribute to our understanding of the effect of historic government-level decisions on health-relevant psychological processes of Americans.

To examine these questions, 1000 participants (500 self-identified gay and lesbian individuals and 500 heterosexual comparisons) will be recruited for a longitudinal study in which they complete a research survey prior to the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, 2 months post-ruling, and 6 months post-ruling. Changes in psychological variables related to social attitudes and how participants experience their social identities will be examined, as well as the effects of these changes on psychological and physical well-being. This study will inform our understanding of the social psychological factors involved in people's responses to judicial decisions that are relevant to their standing in society. These results are likely to extend beyond this specific issue and provide a platform for understanding how other judicial decisions might have similar or different psychological consequences.

Project Summary Each year, up to 40% of adolescents witness or experience an assault in their community. The stress of such exposures to violence (EtV) greatly increases the probability of initiating use of illicit drugs as well as becoming addicted to them. This proposal tests the hypothesis that the stress of EtV recalibrates the neural processes underlying emotional reactivity and regulation, which leads to changes in affect reactivity, risk-taking, and working memory. These psychological changes, either independently or in concert, lead to increased risk for the initiation and escalation of substance use. We also hypothesize that the degree to which EtV elicits these changes in brain and behavior is highly dependent on the environmental context in which EtV occurs and therefore moderated by community level factors (e.g. collective efficacy; neighborhood economic disadvantage) as well as more traditionally measured psychological factors. To test this multi-system model of EtV's effects on substance use, we will recruit from our ongoing, longitudinal developmental study of 1500 adolescents in Franklin County, OH, a subsample (n=600) that will continue (at years 2 and 5; 4 total time points) these ecological momentary assessment (EMA), global positioning (GPS), and interview assessments of spatial exposures to EtV and substance use (including objective head hair measures). At 2 additional time points (years 1 and 4), youths will complete a comprehensive neuroimaging battery that includes measurements of brain structure, resting state activity, and neural activity during 4 well-validated neurocognitive tasks that probe the processes hypothesized to be affected by EtV and associated with increased risk for substance use: (1) risk-taking behavior; (2) reward sensitivity; (3) threat reactivity; and (4) working memory. In support of our theory linking EtV to substance use, each of these tasks has been shown to be impacted by stressful experiences like EtV as well as altered by regular substance use. Targeted recruitment from the parent study will enhance the proportion of youths who have already used illicit substances as well as experienced EtV. Aim 1 determines the independent effects of EtV and substance use on longitudinal changes in neural structure and function as well as cross-sectional differences. Aim 2 determines the degree to which neural activity predicts future substance use. Aim 3 evaluates the degree to which community resilience and risk factors moderate these changes in neural function and structure. Example moderators include neighborhood and activity space exposures (e.g. collective efficacy, violence levels), family social processes and resources (e.g. parental monitoring, poverty), and life history (early childhood adversity) factors. With a longitudinal design, we will be able to determine the temporal ordering of how these risk and resilience factors modify the trajectory of neural changes resulting from EtV, which will provide new understanding of how these variables influence substance abuse risk and suggest targets for intervention at the community, psychological, or neural level that might prevent or attenuate the enduring effects of EtV.

The behavioral or ?social distancing? response to the COVID-19 pandemic will largely determine the rate at which the virus spreads throughout the U.S. population. To encourage social distancing, many states have closed schools and nonessential businesses and instituted ?Stay-at-Home? orders that limit trips to necessary activities such as grocery shopping and medical care. While Stay-at-Home orders are typically considered mandatory, most states rely on voluntary compliance rather than penalize infractions through citations or arrests. A persistent concern throughout the crisis has been the extent to which individuals are choosing to practice social distancing effectively in order to slow the growth of the pandemic. Yet, to date, virtually no systematic information has emerged on differences in social distancing across social groups by income, race/ethnicity, and residential neighborhood and, critically, why these differences exist. This project will address this gap by collecting detailed data on social distancing practices during the COVID-19 pandemic ? including the timing and location of non-home trips over the course of a week ? from a sample of youth and their caregivers in the Columbus, OH area. The study will build on an ongoing project focused on differences in patterns of everyday activity under normal (non-pandemic) conditions). Enhanced effectiveness of social distancing holds the potential to save millions of lives, reduce the burden to inevitably taxed health care systems during pandemics, and mitigate potential longer-term damage to the US and global economies due to ineffective pandemic containment. Findings from the project will provide crucial guidance to policy-makers who must target interventions to most effectively contain viral outbreaks and address the needs of the most vulnerable populations during pandemics. Findings will also provide important information for epidemiologists who must model disease spread based on realistic assumptions regarding social distancing practices across the population. Finally, clinicians will also benefit from more precise information on infection risk profiles at the individual level.

COVID-19 has prompted requirements for social-distancing, and yet we know little about who complies and who does not. This project will re-contact 246 households (N=309 youth) who participated in an ongoing NIH-funded study of everyday spatial exposures that was in the field in the period prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (the Adolescent Health and Development in Context study). Objective 1 of the study will investigate the association between income, race/ethnicity, and residential neighborhood economic disadvantage and typical (pre-pandemic) exposure to higher infection risk locations as captured by the density of social interaction at those places. These data will shed light on infection risk during the early stages of the pandemic before social distancing behaviors were widely adopted. The study will leverage unique data from the baseline study on the geographic location and associated characteristics of everyday places visited based on a novel survey-based method for the collection of geographically-referenced activity data. Objective 2 of the study will re-administer this location data collection approach during the peak period of the pandemic to measure income, race/ethnicity and neighborhood variation in the extent of social distancing behaviors for both caregivers and youth. Objective 3 will address the consequences of pandemic exposure and social distancing behaviors for economic hardship, mental health, family conflict, and youth behavioral problems. The project will generate the first geographically referenced data on the mobility of youth and their caregivers during pandemics in combination with extensive, high quality social survey data. Findings will inform sociological theories regarding the social and geographic determinants of compliance behavior, which complement psychological investigations more attuned to personality and individual determinants of the same.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Project Summary It is well known that stressful events, such as those occurring as a result of COVID-19 prevention efforts, are a potent trigger for the initiation and escalation of illicit substance use. However, it is not well known how stress triggers increased substance use, which could help improve understanding, prevention, and treatment of substance use disorders. Therefore, our ongoing longitudinal study of adolescents was designed to test the hypothesis that stress during development recalibrates the neural processes underlying threat and reward reactivity as well as working memory capacity, which leads to increased risk for the initiation and escalation of substance use. Because COVID-19 related social distancing is a profound stressor, measuring it?s effects provides an opportunity to better understand these hypothesized pathways by which stress increases substance use. Therefore, we propose to recontact adolescents (n=309) and caregivers (n=246) in our ongoing longitudinal study to assess changes in stress, cognitive function, and substance use due to the COVID-19 pandemic at two time points. At both time points, youths will also complete a working memory capacity task and delay discounting assessment and have their locations tracked with GPS for a week while they receive 35 ecological momentary assessment (EMA) prompts to assess their momentary stress, social interactions, substance use, and feelings at particular locations as was done in prior waves. In Aim 1, we focus on 3 particular categories of stress to understand their relative contribution to increased substance use: (1) Social distancing experiences: the GPS and questionnaire assessments of activity patterns provide a quantitative, state-of-the-art measure of the magnitude of change in individual mobility elicited by COVID-19 social distancing; (2) Economic hardship: Because our sample is socioeconomically diverse (37.4% have annual household incomes under $30,000), we will have the opportunity to clarify the effects of increased economic challenges on substance use; (3) Social isolation and conflict: The questionnaire and EMA data on frequency of interpersonal interaction and conflict provide the opportunity to determine if these are also triggers of increased substance use. In Aim 2, potential cognitive mediators of these effects will be assessed using the measurement of working memory capacity and delay discounting. These youths have already completed a neuroimaging session that assessed neural structure (anatomy and connectivity), resting state activity, and activity during tasks probing working memory capacity (Emotional N-Back), reward reactivity (viewing images of marijuana, e-cigs, and alcohol), reward anticipation (Monetary Incentive Delay), and threat reactivity (emotional faces). Because these same procedures will be repeated as soon as research activity can resume after COVID-19 restrictions are lifted, Aim 3 will be to determine how COVID-19 related stress moderates changes in neural structure and function as well as the degree to which these neural changes predict changes in substance use.