@article{ref1,
title="Transcendent thinking counteracts longitudinal effects of mid-adolescent exposure to community violence in the anterior cingulate cortex",
journal="Journal of research on adolescence",
year="2024",
author="Yang, Xiao-Fei and Hilliard, Katrina and Gotlieb, Rebecca and Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen",
volume="ePub",
number="ePub",
pages="ePub-ePub",
abstract="Adolescence involves extensive brain maturation, characterized by social sensitivity and emotional lability, that co-occurs with increased independence. Mid-adolescence is also a hallmark developmental stage when youths become motivated to reflect on the broader personal, ethical, and systems-level implications of happenings, a process we term transcendent thinking. Here, we examine the confluence of these developmental processes to ask, from a transdisciplinary perspective, how might community violence exposure (CVE) impact brain development during mid-adolescence, and how might youths' dispositions for transcendent thinking be protective? Fifty-five low-SES urban youth with no history of delinquency (32 female; 27 Latinx, 28 East Asian) reported their CVE and underwent structural MRI first at age 14-18, and again 2 years later. At the study's start, participants also discussed their feelings about 40 minidocumentaries featuring other teens' compelling situations in a 2-h private interview that was transcribed and coded for transcendent thinking. Controlling for CVE and brain structure at the start: (1) New CVE during the 2-year inter-scan interval was associated with greater gray matter volume (GMV) reduction over that interval in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a central network hub whose reduced volume has been associated with posttraumatic stress disorder, and across multiple additional cortical and subcortical regions; (2) participants' transcendent thinking in the interview independently predicted greater GMV increase during the 2-year inter-scan interval in the ACC. <br><br>FINDINGS highlight the continued vulnerability of mid-adolescents to community violence and the importance of supporting teens' dispositions to reflect on the complex personal and systems-level implications and affordances of their civic landscape.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="1050-8392",
doi="10.1111/jora.12993",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jora.12993"
}