Growing up in an environment of constant social tension (whether at home, in the neighborhood, or at school) can change the brains of preteens and harm their mental health many months later.
This is what emerges from a study published in Psychological Medicinewhich analyzed data on nearly 12,000 9-10 year old US children collected as part of the ABCD study, discovering that perceiving social threats alters the connectivity of some brain networks.
Altered brain connections. The study followed the participants six and thirty months after the first analysis: in both follow-ups the children who perceived greater social threats were also those with greater mental health problems.
In particular, being immersed in hostile environments with high levels of social threats weakened connections within the brain networks that manage cognitive control (frontoparietal network), internal cognitive processes (DMN, default mode network) and attention (dorsal attention network and cingulo-opercular network).
On the contrary, the connections between these networks were stronger – and this is not a good thing, because the simultaneous activation of networks dealing with internal and external thoughts leads to possible “interference” and concentration difficulties.
The importance of the family climate. Family conflicts have the greatest influence on these connections, followed by lack of safety at school and in the neighborhood.
In light of their findings, the authors suggest that policies and interventions in family, school and community settings could help strengthen the feeling of social security and thus protect the mental health of young people.
