UC Riverside Undergraduate Research Journal

Community violence exposure increases risk for fear-based disorders, such as anxiety, potentially due to disrupted recall of extinguished fear, whereby stimuli previously associated with threat continue to produce a fear response long after they have been deemed safe. However, this emerging work lacks adequate representation of youth from historically marginalized groups, despite their disproportionate exposure to community violence. As such, this study investigates whether such exposure is associated with neurological and behavioral indices of extinction recall in a sample of preadolescent Latina girls. 

Thirty-five predominantly Mexican-heritage Latina girls (MAge = 10.04, SD = 1.23, range = 8-12 years) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while completing an extinction recall task assessing their ability to retrieve related but competing memories of previously conditioned and extinguished threats. Following the fMRI scan, participants self-reported their community violence exposure using the Things I’ve Seen and Heard scale.

Relative to low community violence exposed youth, youth exposed to higher levels of community violence demonstrated significantly less ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) engagement in response to increasingly ambiguous conditioned stimuli and were also marginally more likely to misattribute threat to conditioned stimuli that were least likely to predict threat.

These preliminary results suggest community violence exposure may contribute to disruptions in extinction recall and elucidate a potential mechanism by which these experiences could elevate anxiety, particularly among an understudied group during a sensitive developmental period of heightened anxiety risk.