Residence in Communities With Higher Violent Crimes Associated With Lower Reward-related Brain Function

A growing body of research suggests that exposure to adversities shapes neural development and function that guide approach motivation and decision-making. Residing in communities with high violent crime is considered a form of adversity. However, its link to brain function is not adequately understood. Furthermore, most of the adversity literature examines individual-level exposure (eg, crime victimization), whereas efforts to consider neighborhood-level factors (eg, neighborhood safety) are sparse. This study examined the hypothesis that late adolescents and emerging adults who lived in a community with higher violent crime rates would exhibit altered reward-related neural activation.

Adolescents ( N = 101; 55% females) participated in the fMRI monetary incentive delay task. Participants' hometown violent crime statistics were extracted from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports. Multiple regressions examined the association of crime rates with nucleus accumbens (NAc) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) activation to reward anticipation or outcome.

Living in high-crime communities was associated with lower NAc activation during reward anticipation ( B = -0.041, SE = 0.015, t = -2.695, P = 0.008, adjusted P = 0.032; ΔR2 = 0.061), and not with OFC activation during anticipation, or NAc and OFC activation during outcome.

Residence in neighborhoods with high levels of environmental threat, characteristic of high-crime communities, may be linked with blunted NAc reward anticipation. Although living in a high-crime community is a passive form of exposure to adversity, these findings indicate that it may be sufficient to observe distinct individual differences in reward-related brain function.