Abstract
While studies have indicated an association between socioeconomic status (SES) and neuroimaging measures, weaker SES effects are shown for Blacks than Whites. This is, in part, due to processes such as stratification, racism, minoritization, and othering of Black people in the United States. However, less is known about Latino youth. This study had two aims: First, to test the association between parental education and the right and left nucleus accumbens (NAcc) resting-state functional connectivity with the frontoparietal network (FPN) in children; and second, to investigate ethnic heterogeneity in this association. This cross-sectional study used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. We analyzed the resting-state functional connectivity data (rsFC) of 10,840 US preadolescents who were between 9 and 10 years old. The main outcomes were the NAcc resting-state functional connectivity with FPN separately calculated for right and left hemispheres. Parental education was our independent variable. Family structure, sex, and age were covariates. Furthermore, ethnicity (Latino vs. non-Latino) was regarded as the moderator. We used mixed-effects regression for data analysis with and without interaction terms between parental education and ethnicity. Most participants (n = 8690; 80.2%) were non-Latino and 2150 (19.8%) were Latino. Parental education was associated with higher right and left NAcc resting-state functional connectivity with FPN. Ethnicity showed statistically significant interactions with parental education, suggesting that the positive associations between parental education and right and left NAcc resting-state functional connectivity with FPN were different in non-Latino and Latino children. For right hemisphere, we found significantly stronger and for left hemisphere, we found significantly weaker association for Latino compared with non-Latino preadolescents. Preadolescents’ NAcc resting-state functional connectivity with FPN depends on the intersections of ethnicity, parental education, and laterality.
Highlights
The right and left nucleus accumbens (NAcc) are subcortical brain structures, located within the ventral striatum, that serve as a key limbic-motor interface, and have an important role in Pavlovian learning [1, 2]
This means that the right and left NAcc contribute to the regulation of emotional and motivation processing [3], incentive salience [4], pleasure, reward, and reinforcement [5]
We hypothesized that parental education would be positively associated with the functional connectivity of the right and left NAcc and frontoparietal network (FPN), and that there would be a weaker effect of parental education on the right and left NAcc functional connectivity with FPN for Latino than non-Latino preadolescents
Summary
The right and left nucleus accumbens (NAcc) are subcortical brain structures, located within the ventral striatum, that serve as a key limbic-motor interface, and have an important role in Pavlovian learning [1, 2]. The right and left NAcc have been implicated in obesity [2, 6], food addiction [7], tobacco, alcohol, and drug-seeking behaviors [8–10], obsessive-compulsive disorder [11, 12], depression [13], and anxiety [12] To fulfill their functions, the right and left NAcc communicate with a number of large-scale brain networks such as the frontoparietal network (FPN) [14–16]. There is an interest to test heterogeneity of the effects of parental conditions and to investigate the multiplicative and nonadditive effects of parental resources and other factors that impact child development [67] While these differential effects of parental education are shown for structure and function of some brain regions such as amygdala [69], thalamus [70], hippocampus [71], and cerebral cortex [68, 72, 73], less is known about heterogeneity of the effects of parental education on NAcc. Previous neuroimaging studies have shown the association between parental education and children’s brain function and structure [56, 65]. It is necessary to examine the connectivity between the right and left NAcc and FPN that may reflect reward salience, reward process, cognitive control [75–77], and various cognition, emotions, and psychological problems [75, 76]
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