Subjective Socioeconomic Status and Children's Amygdala Volume: Minorities' Diminish Returns

Shervin Assari; Shanika Boyce; Mohsen Bazargan

doi:10.3390/neurosci1020006

Subjective Socioeconomic Status and Children's Amygdala Volume: Minorities' Diminish Returns

NeuroSci. 2020 Dec;1(2):59-74. doi: 10.3390/neurosci1020006. Epub 2020 Oct 5.

Authors

Shervin Assari^{1

2}, Shanika Boyce³, Mohsen Bazargan^{1

4}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Family Medicine, Charles R Drew University of Medicine and Science, Los Angeles, CA 90059, USA.
² Department of Urban Public Health, Charles R Drew University of Medicine and Science, Los Angeles, CA 90059, USA.
³ Department of Pediatrics, Charles R Drew University of Medicine and Science, Los Angeles, CA 90059, USA.
⁴ Department of Family Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.

PMID: 33103157
DOI: 10.3390/neurosci1020006

Abstract

Considerable research has suggested that low socioeconomic status (SES) negatively influences brain structure, including but not limited to decreased amygdala volume. Considering race and ethnicity as sociological rather than biological constructs, this study was built on minorities' diminished returns (MDRs) to test if the effects of family SES on the total amygdala volume is weaker for black and Latino children than white and non-Latino children. We borrowed data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, a national multi-center brain imaging investigation of childhood brain development in the US. The total sample was 9380 9-10-year-old children. The independent variables were subjective family SES and parental education. The primary outcome was total amygdala volume. High subjective SES and parental education were independently associated with larger total amygdala size. The association between high subjective SES and larger total amygdala volume was less pronounced for black and Latino children than white and non-Latino children. For American children, family SES has unequal effects on amygdala size and function, a pattern that is consistent with MDRs. This result suggests that SES loses some of its expected effects for racial and ethnic minority families.

Keywords: amygdala; brain development; emotion regulation; limbic system; negative emotion; socioeconomic position; socioeconomic status; structural MRI.