Urban Black youths are disproportionately likely to experience interpersonal traumatic events such as assault or abuse and to suffer negative consequences of these experiences;however, post-traumatic distress is both underidentified and undertreated in this high-risk population. A first step toward increasing access to appropriate services for these youths is developing unbiased, theoretically-based measures of pathological responses to interpersonal traumatic stress that map clearly onto biological mechanisms and effective treatment approaches. One class of measures-face attention bias tasks which measure tendencies to attend to/avoid interpersonal trauma-related cues (e.g., angry faces)-holds particular potential for use in efficiently targeting and treating post-traumatic distress in diverse individuals across the lifespan. Not only are these measures grounded in cognitive theories of psychopathology, but they have also been linked to pathological biological stress responses and their effective treatment. However, because stimulus race influences emotional face processing, it is unclear whether existing face attention bias tasks, which include few Black faces, are sensitive and appropriate for Black youths. Therefore, face attention bias measures are needed that include Black stimulus faces, to facilitate examination of the role of stimulus race in eliciting attention biases for threat in Black individuals. In light of this need, the goal of the current R03 proposal is to develop a novel attention bias measure, the Diverse Dot Probe (DDP), as a first step in clarifying how attention biases for facial threat manifest in Black youths at high risk for interpersonal trauma. The first specific aim is to create a master set of stimulus photographs in which Black and White models pose happy, angry, and neutral expressions.
The second aim i s to incorporate these images into a computer-administered attention bias task (the Diverse Dot Probe or DDP) and to evaluate the reliability and validity of this measure in two groups of urban Black children (7-9 year olds, N = 50;10-12 year-olds, N = 50) at high risk for trauma. The proposed study constitutes a first step toward the long term goal of elucidating biologically- based cognitive correlates of interpersonal trauma-related distress in diverse populations to facilitate more precise diagnosis and treatment in youths of racial minorities. Findings will serve as a basis for two lines of future work, the first aimed at characterizing attention biases in larger community samples of both Black and White youths from childhood through adolescence. The second line of future work will comprise neuroimaging studies designed to document neural correlates of attention bias to same- and other-race threat cues.
Interpersonal trauma (abuse, assault) is associated with striking negative health consequences for urban Black/African-American youths, but existing tools for identifying those at risk have limitations when used in this population. The proposed study centers on the development of a brief, theoretically-based, culturally competent measure of attention bias for threat, which has potential to facilitate rapid and accurate identification of Black youths at risk for trauma-related distress without reliance on self-report. Given the exceedingly high costs that interpersonal trauma exacts in urban populations, successful development of a quick, simple, and salient assessment measure that can be linked to well-defined cognitive and neural markers of psychopathology has the potential for marked public health impact.
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| Tone, Erin B; Davis, Jennifer S (2012) Paranoid thinking, suspicion, and risk for aggression: a neurodevelopmental perspective. Dev Psychopathol 24:1031-46 |
