Office for Disparities Research and Workforce Diversity Webinar Series: Mechanisms of Risk and Resilience for Mental Health in Individuals of Mexican Origin

Transcript

DR. TATIANA MEZA‑CERVERA: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Office for Disparities Research and Workforce Diversity Summer Webinar Series.

My name is Dr. Tatiana Meza‑Cervera. I'm the program director of Diversity, Supplements and Youth Mental Health Disparities Research.

Today's webinar is titled Mechanisms of Risk and Resilience for Mental Health in Individuals of Mexican Origin. All the research being presented today is part of the California Families Project.

This project is an ongoing longitudinal study examining the health, development, and well‑being of 674 Mexican‑origin youth and their parents. The project was launched in 2006 when the youth were 10 years old. Annual assessments occurred when the youth were ages 10 to 19, 21, 23 and 26. And wave 14 is currently in progress.

We have four talks lined up today. Doctors Swartz, Lawson, Cruz, and Guyer will be discussing their research examining mental health from childhood through young adulthood in individuals of Mexican‑origin.

I will go ahead and pass it to Dr. Swartz, who will be discussing risk and protective factors for the development of depression in Mexican‑origin young adults.

JOHNNA SWARTZ: Thank you so much. I'll share my slides quickly. Okay. Hopefully that's working and you can see my slides.

So, thank you so much for this invitation to present and to develop this webinar today. And thanks for everyone who is attending and listening to our talks. And so, I'm Johnna Swartz. I'm an associate professor of human ecology at UC Davis, and I'm going to talk about risk and protective factors for the development of depression in Mexican‑origin young adults.

Let me see if I can advance my slide. Because I'm the first talk in this webinar, I'm going to give a little bit longer introduction than normal for my talk and kind of give a broader overview of the California Families Project  since all our talks will be drawing on data from that project. So that's kind of going to be the first half of my talk today.

So, I wanted to start with the question of, why focus on health disparities in Mexican‑origin individuals? Why is this an important population to focus on? I'll start with a few statistics.

So, the Latino population in the U.S. has grown 23 percent from the years 2010 to 2020. And the Latino population is expected to comprise over 28 percent of the U.S. population by 2060. And I'll say briefly that the reason we're using Latino as a term is that's kind of the preferred term by participants in the California Families Project. So that's the term we've chosen to use.

So, this population is a large proportion of the U.S. population. It continues to grow. And of this population, let me see if I can advance ‑‑ about 62 percent is Mexican‑origin. So, individuals of Mexican‑origin make up a large proportion of this population. And one of the reasons that it's important to study this population is because health disparities have been identified in the diagnosis of mental health problems such as depression and access to treatment and in effective or successful treatment outcomes. So, it is important to think about mental health and access to treatment and effective treatments in this population. Yet this population is underrepresented in research.And that's important because if we don't have sufficient representation of this population research, it makes it difficult to look at risk and protective processes that may be more specific or unique to this population.

And so those are some of the important reasons to have studies that have sufficient representation of this population in research on mental health. Okay. So, I'm going to move on from there. And now as I mentioned, give a little bit broader overview on the California Families Project. So, researchers at UC Davis developed the California Families Project to address this underrepresentation in research of individuals of Mexican‑origin.

So as Tatiana already mentioned, the participants in the California Families Project includes 674 Mexican‑origin youth and their parents. So, the total sample size, including both the youth and the parents, is about 1,780 participants.

Some quick details on the population. The median parental education is about ninth grade and the median household income for the participants is about $32,500. 86 percent of the parents and 29 percent of the youth were born in Mexico. And I want to give some kind of introduction to the guiding principles and some of the things that make this data and this project unique and important. So, one of the factors as we've already mentioned is this focus on historically underrepresented population, and I mentioned a few slides back about why it's important to have sufficient representation in research to study unique or specific risks and protective factors within this population.

So, everyone in the California Families Project is of Mexican‑origin. Another kind of guiding principle of this project is taking a life history approach and studying people as they develop and change over time. So as Tatiana also mentioned, this is a longitudinal study. It's been going on for almost 20 years now. So, it's really followed people for a long period of time, which allows us to look at developmental processes as they unfold and not only have the youth been followed a long period over time, but the parents of the youth have been followed as well. And so that allows us to look at developmental transitions like the transition from childhood to adolescence and from adolescence to early adulthood for the youth, and for the parents, transitions across different stages of adulthood and aging as well. It really allows us to look across the whole lifespan at different risks and protective processes.

It's multi‑generational and uses a family systems approach. As I mentioned, it's not just the youth that have been followed over time but also the parents, allowing us to look at parent/child relationships, other aspects of family functioning and how families change and develop over time as well.

And it uses a multilevel approach from neurons to neighborhoods and multiple methods of assessment to look at these factors that influence personality and mental health over time.

So, at the neuron level, many of the youth that are part of the California Families Project have participated in some studies where they've done functional magnetic resonance imaging, a type of neuroimaging that allows us to look at brain structure and function.

You'll hear more about that in the last talk of the webinar today with Dr.Amanda Guyer's talk. There are measures of brain function in many of these participants. There are self‑report measures from the youth, there is self‑report measures from the parents, there is parent report measures where parents report on the youth.

There's a wide variety of measures of personality and mental health and different developmental outcomes and processes that we'd be interested in looking at.

Then there's also measures at the more contextual level. So, we have information on characteristics of the neighborhoods that these families are living in, characteristics of the school that the youth went to. So, we can really take this broad look at how factors at these different levels from brain to personality and social context, family context, neighborhoods, school, how those all interact and shape development over time. It's a rich longitudinal dataset that allows us to look at these processes and fold‑over development.

I'll go over this timeline briefly, but this is just the overview of the timeline for the youth participants in the California Families Project. So, I'm not showing you the timeline for the parent participants, although they were often interviewed on a similar timeline.

So, youth were enrolled when they were age 10. They were interviewed every year after that. Some assessments were given every year. Some assessments were given every other year, depending on the time available for assessments. And they've continued to be followed through adolescence, through the transition into young adulthood and across the 20s as well. We can really look at those changes over time, and during developmental transitions, like the transition from adolescence into young adulthood. 

And one thing I wanted to point out about this table showing the assessments is the bottom row which shows the retention rates. So, as you can see in the bottom row, the retention rates have been high for this project over time. So almost all the retention rates are above 80 percent. Many are close to or above 90 percent. That's a good retention rate for a longitudinal study especially for one that's been going on for such a long time and that allows us, since the participants have been really generous with giving their time and participating in the assessments every year, that again really allows us to look at these developmental processes as they change and unfold over time. So that's another nice aspect of this study for answering a lot of different research questions.

So, with that kind of broader overview of the guiding principles of the California Families Project, with the remaining time that I have left in my talk, I thought I would just give a couple of quick examples of some of the types of analyses that we look at in my lab, looking at risk and protective processes for depression in young adulthood .

This won't be very comprehensive since I don't have a ton of time to go over this but, again, just a couple of examples. For these examples, I thought I'd highlight research conducted by my former graduate student, Angelica Carranza, who just graduated with her Ph.D. in human development over the summer and has started a post‑doc at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I wanted to give her a shout‑out since this research is part of her dissertation research. She's also the lead author on this paper, which is currently under review, and then also give her a shout‑out as a rising scholar in this field of youth mental health, someone to look out for more research in the future.

So, one of the questions she looked at as part of her dissertation was whether discrimination in early adolescence would predict depression symptoms in young adulthood. And the kind of reasoning for this or the prior literature motivating this is that a good amount of her literature has shown that discrimination is a risk factor for depression in this population.

So higher levels of discrimination are often correlated with higher depression symptoms, but a lot of this research has been cross‑sectional, which means discrimination and depression have been measured at the same point in time.

And when it is longitudinal, they're usually only measured maybe a few years apart. Because we have such a long ongoing longitudinal study with the California Families Project, we were able to look at how discrimination at a much earlier stage in early adolescence would be associated with young adult depression symptoms.

So, to look at this, Angelica created a growth curve model. These are self‑report measures of discrimination. These were completed by the youth in the project at ages 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14. Those went into a growth curve model to estimate the intercept and slope of discrimination, how discrimination changes over those ages, and then she looked at that as a predictor of depression symptoms in young adulthood at ages 21 and 23. They were averaged together. That early adulthood period.

What she found in this growth curve model that the effects went into the predicted direction. So higher discrimination, intercept and slope were associated with higher depression symptoms, this analysis was not statistically significant. So, we did not see a statistically significant association between this growth curve of discrimination and depression symptoms in young adulthood, but something that was interesting about this analysis when she kind of went into this in more detail. She also looked at ‑‑ she also reported the correlations between discrimination at each of the ages separately and then the young adult depression symptoms, she did find that discrimination at age 14 specifically was both associated with depression symptoms at age 14, so we did get that cross‑sectional association that's been found in prior research, but discrimination at age 14 was also associated with depression symptoms in young adulthood at ages 21 and 23.

That suggests either that this risk factor of discrimination, when it occurs closer in time to the mental health outcome, is maybe a stronger predictor, or maybe it's something specifically about discrimination occurring around this age, around 14, around middle adolescence, that makes it a stronger risk factor.

I'll mention we chose this kind of cutoff of age 14 for looking at early adolescent discrimination, because as another part of her dissertation she also looked at brain mediators of associations with discrimination and later outcomes and the brain mediators were measured at ages 16 and 18.

So that's why we kind of chose that age 14 cutoff so we could look at how earlier adolescent factors influence brain function at 16 and 18.

So we can't say just yet that at age 14, specifically, that that is a risk factor because we didn't look at discrimination at later ages, but I think it starts to show how we can start to look at the timing of these risk factors and looking at whether there's periods where there's maybe potentially stronger risks for some of these risk factors when maybe more interventions or support might be warranted during those periods. I think more systematic research is needed where we compare discrimination at age 14 to other periods of development to see which are the strongest predictors of young adult depression symptoms.

One other thing I just wanted to quickly give as examples is another part of her dissertation research where we looked at protective factors for depression symptoms as well, and based on prior reviews of the literature, she looked at two different protective factors that she hypothesized would be associated with lower depression symptoms based on prior literature.

The first was positive ethnic identity, which describes having a positive view towards one's racial or ethnic identity. And she looked at this again at different ages, and in this analysis, she found that positive ethnic identity at age 19 there was evidence that that was a protective factor of depression symptoms at ages 21 and 23.

So specifically having a more positive ethnic identity at age 19 was associated with lower depression symptoms at ages 21 and 23. And she also looked at ethnic identity at younger ages at 10 to 14, since we were comparing these early adolescent influences, and found that that was not a significant predictor of young adult depression symptoms.

It's only the age 19 measure that she looked at that predicted lower depression symptoms for this protective factor. She also looked at familism as another potential protective factor based on prior research.

Familism, or familiso in Spanish, is a cultural value that involves valuing support, strong relationships and cohesion within the family.

She found similar effects here were having stronger or having endorsed stronger familism values at age 19 was associated with lower depression symptoms at ages 21 and 23.

So, again, some more support for this being a protective factor that can potentially help protect against or be associated with lower depression symptoms.

Also, interesting about this analysis, when she looked at age 10 to 14 familism, that was not associated with young adult depression symptoms. So, again, another analysis where the protective factor here closer in time was a stronger predictor, more strongly associated with those young adult depression symptoms.

Okay. Some initial conclusions we can start to draw from these analyses, and I think there's many more analyses that need to be done before we can draw firmer conclusions, but I kind of wanted to wrap it up with some initial thoughts about these results.

So one is that the findings from the study suggest that risk and protective factors closer in time may be more strongly associated with mental health outcomes like depression when we're looking at them in young adulthood. Although it's interesting that age 14 discrimination, even though that's far out earlier in development was still associated with young adult depression symptoms.

So, is it something specific about age 14, or is it just that it was closer in time? That's something we can continue to look at with further analyses.

But one caveat I wanted to mention about the discrimination findings, and specifically the finding that the growth curve model of discrimination from 10 to 14 was not a significant predictor of young adult depression symptoms, is that the participants, the youth in the California Families Project reported relatively low levels of discrimination at these ages.

So, when we looked at the means and the standard deviations of these variables at these ages, they were low overall. I think it also points to the importance of considering context. So, this is the California Families Project. So, all these youth were living and growing up in the northern California area around the UC Davis study site. And California's a very diverse state. There's a large proportion of individuals of Mexican‑origin living in California. So, youth in this project might have perceived different levels of discrimination compared to youth in other states in less diverse states in other parts of the country.

So, I think it is important to consider the context that these youth are living in and acknowledge that we can't generalize results from this population and this context to individuals living in other states in other geographic regions and other contexts.

We need more representation of youth from different contexts from different regions so that we can continue to generalize more broadly as well. That's one important thing I wanted to mention.

Also, I wanted to mention that we did see that age 14 discrimination was a predictor of young adult depression symptoms. So, we're seeing evidence that even in early adolescence it's still a risk factor for depression symptoms, having these experiences of discrimination.

For the findings on protective factors, these kind of preliminarily suggest that interventions aiming to support youth during the transition from adolescence into young adulthood, and that transition can be kind of risky for the development of depression.

We often see kind of depression starting to develop or onset during that period. So, interventions aiming to give support could be aimed at promoting protective factors such as positive ethnic identity and familism around this transition since we saw it at higher levels of these protective factors or these were protective at least in this sample at age 19, were associated with lower depression symptoms in young adulthood.

That gives us some information about potential timing and what maybe could be intervened on to help reduce risks for depression or lower depression symptoms.

And hopefully, more broadly, these quick examples of these analyses have helped to demonstrate the benefits of longitudinal data such as the California Families Project  allowing to look at how influences earlier in development shape young adult mental health outcomes, allowing us to look at the timing of these influences and when it might be best to time interventions or maybe add more support if there are specific ages or periods when these risks or protective factors more strongly predict mental health outcomes.

So that's something we'll plan to continue to look at with this project and something hopefully you'll see with the other talks in this webinar is how we can use this data to better understand these developmental processes.

Then lastly, I just want to conclude by acknowledging the NIH funding that has gone to supporting different waves of this project and different substudies and the collaborators on the research that I presented about in my talk.  And I think then I will pass it over to Dr. Lawson next for your talk.

KATHERINE "KAILEY" LAWSON: Okay, I think we are set with the slides. Hi.

My name is Kailey Lawson. I am an assistant professor at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. I'm looking forward to chatting with you all today about the trajectories of temperament from late childhood through adolescence and associations with subsequent anxiety and depression.

Adolescent temperament refers to individual differences in reactivity and self‑regulation that are present from an early age and relatively enduring. Previous research indicated robustly that adolescent temperament is concurrently related to anxiety and depression. There's a lot less known about what's going on longitudinally, what these prospective associations are.

And of the longitudinal work that does exist, most of it highlights negative emotionality as a risk factor. But there's much less work on temperamental protective factors of mental health; and when we're talking about mental health, it's important to consider the context that people are living in, the structural factors that can exacerbate mental health problems.

For our sample of Mexican‑origin youth, this might include things like acculturative stress, adverse socioeconomic conditions and ethnic discrimination. And to take this more integrated model of child and adolescent development in context, García Coll's Integrative Model provides us an awesome opportunity to be able to do that.

From this model, we can see on the left side with the light blue, like bigger shaded area, these are different societal constructs that are impacting child characteristics that are shown in that upper right‑hand corner, and in particular today I'm going to be focused most on one of these child characteristics, which is temperament, and trying to unpack a little bit about how temperament is changing across adolescence, how it is related to subsequent mental health and soon some of the factors that are impacting adolescent temperament development.

So, the first research questions that I want to focus on today, are, on average, how does temperament change as people go through adolescence, and to what extent do individuals follow this typical or normative trajectory? And is adolescent temperament trajectories associated with anxiety and depression in young adulthood?

And the goals of this study really highlight some of the awesome strengths about the California Families Project. We're able to cover a broad developmental period. I'm going to be using data from age 10 to age 21. We're leveraging multimethod assessment. So not just relying on self‑reports or parent reports, but kind of combining different assessment methods to get at constructs from various views.

We're also examining associations in a sample of Mexican‑origin youth, which is a population that's been historically excluded from psychological research. In doing so, we're doing our best to align this work with the positive youth development framework, recognizing risk factors but also emphasizing sources of strength and resilience.

Something you are already familiar with; these data are coming from the California Families Project and focusing on data from those 674 Mexican‑origin youth assessed across this time.

In particular, the temperament measures that I'm going to be using today start at age 10. Then we have them again at 12, 14 and 16, and the mental health variables I'm going to be talking about are assessed at 19 and 21. That's our prospective associations.

And the temperament measures are both self‑reported by the adolescents and mother reported on the Early Adolescent Temperament Questionnaire‑Revised, a measure defined by Ellis and Rothbart. It captures three domains that are important for adolescent temperament or adolescent personality.

These include effortful control which involves regulatory traits like inhibition, activation control and attention; negative emotionality, which involves tendencies towards fear or frustration or sadness; and positive emotionality, which involves tendencies toward excitement, enthusiasm and activity.

To look at the trajectories of these temperaments, domains across time, we used latent growth curve modeling where you're estimating both a level where adolescents are starting out and a slope how they are changing across time and using these latent growth curve models allow us to estimate an average or mean level trajectory as well as variability around that normative trajectory.

So, looking at this graph, on the X axis we have age, 10, 12, 14 and 16. On the Y axis, we have effortful control, where higher numbers would indicate more self‑control and lower numbers would indicate less.

If we expect, for effortful control, for example, to be increasing across adolescence, we expect to get this kind of upward trend. But what we see, on average, are small decreases in effortful control across adolescence, indicating that they're becoming less inhibited and worse at controlling themselves across this period, on average.

For negative emotionality, again, we might expect in this case decreases where youth are getting more emotionally stable as they get older.

Indeed, this is what we see. This nonlinear decrease in negative emotionality between ages 10 to 16. But something that these figures I have shown you so far are omitting and make them relatively incomplete is that they're suggesting this homogeneity in the trajectory. I'm just showing you one average line saying this is what's happening on average. That's not the full picture.

Despite many similarities among participants in this sample in terms of age and cohort and geographic location and racial ethnic identity, not everybody is following the same pathway. And this figure is again this exact same negative emotionality, mean level trajectory, the thick black line, but we're also seeing every single individual's unique trajectory in these turquoise lines.

So, you can see how much heterogeneity there is in adolescent temperament, development, and this is just one of the ways that individual differences in groups of adolescents is highlighted.

Everybody is developing in their own unique way. Just to round out our third temperament domain of positive emotionality, we tend to see these slight increases before levelling off.

But again, the individual trajectory is showing immense variability in adolescent temperament development.

We know that temperaments are changing across adolescence and that that's happening in different ways for different youth, but now we want to know whether these unique trajectories are associated with subsequent mental health problems.

In our case, this study is looking at anxiety and depression. And this theoretical framework is aligned with what's called the vulnerability model where early levels of adolescent temperament make youth vulnerable to or not vulnerable to subsequent mental health challenges.

Negative emotionality is a very well‑established risk factor, but I want to emphasize two protective factors today. First, effortful control can buffer youth against rumination, disrupt maladaptive thought cycles and promote problem solving, and positive emotionality can enhance enthusiasm and social support to mitigate anhedonia related to depression.

To connect these temperament trajectories to mental health and early adulthood, we used the Mini‑Mood and Anxiety Symptom Questionnaire, which is a questionnaire that asks about three aspects of anxiety and depression, general distress, which what is shared amongst anxiety and depression: anxious arousal and anhedonic depression.

And these symptoms were asked about a particular week when they were 19 or 21, whenever they were interviewed for their annual California Families Project assessment, what were your general distress symptoms, anxious arousal and anhedonic depression symptoms.

And perhaps, unsurprisingly, for negative emotionality, we see that that is associated with increased levels of general distress and anxious arousal and anhedonic depression in young adulthood.

So, these are robust findings. They've been well‑established with cross‑sectional research, and they are extending to our longitudinal data with this underrepresented sample. What is particularly unique, we're also finding evidence for protective factors. Youth who are increasing in their effortful control, those whose slopes are going up over time, they are tending to have lower levels of general distress and anhedonic depression symptoms three to five years later after that trajectory of temperament cutoff.

And you see the same thing with positive emotionality, where greater increases in affiliation as well as higher initial levels are associated with lower levels of anhedonic depression in young adulthood. These data suggest that temperament trajectories serve as both risk and protective factors for subsequent mental health during the week, three, five, sometimes even 10 years later.

But you may be thinking, okay, we're just focusing on this very, very specific aspect of García Coll's, model, where are all these societal structural contexts and constructs that adolescents are living in and how does that impact things like their temperament, development and mental health?

And that is a huge and really, important question that many, many people are focusing their time trying to understand and uncover. And I'm just going to focus on one little subset of that, which is the role of neighborhoods in adolescent temperament development.

So, neighborhoods are environments that adolescents spend a ton of their time. They can impact adolescent temperament in a couple of ways. They've been conceptualized as providers of institutional resources through safety and access to learning environments, as well as sources of socialization. This idea where adolescents can come together in this social group, experience role models, have supervision, develop routine.

But much of the previous work that has been done in temperament and neighborhood research really emphasizes how poverty and crime and residential instability and racially segregated housing negatively influence youth adjustment, and this work is important and influential.

But in our study, we really wanted to emphasize positive youth development. And part of that was incorporating individuals' perceptions of their own neighborhoods that they are living in versus relying on decontextualized census information.

We asked youth about the neighborhoods they live in. We asked both of their parents. We asked visitors who were in this neighborhood how they were perceiving these things. And we also were measuring the neighborhood characteristics at multiple time points.So instead of assuming a static environment, that neighborhood is just one thing that stays the same, we were looking at how neighborhood changes with respect to temperament as well, and we found that institutional resources, how safe participants are feeling in their neighborhood, whether they have access to role models and all of these things, this was associated ‑‑ more institutional resources were associated with lower levels of negative emotionality.

So, youth who are living in neighborhoods with access to well‑resourced environments had lower levels of negative emotionality. Conversely, youth who were living in these well‑resourced neighborhoods where they felt safe, they felt like they were high quality, they were experiencing higher levels of effortful control, and their effortful control was increasing across adolescents.

And we also see here that neighborhood social cohesion was impacting effortful control. So perhaps these youth had higher levels of monitoring by parents and neighbors. More cohesive interactions with their neighbors.

We also see associations with positive emotionality where adolescents living in neighborhoods with more institutional resources, more social cohesion, had higher levels of affiliation.

So overall, what these results tell us, first, importantly, is that there's substantial variability in developmental trajectories of temperament traits among Mexican‑origin youth.

There's a lot of uniqueness in terms of where people are starting and how they're changing across adolescence. Despite that uniqueness, we see effortful control and positive emotionality, robust protective factors against two kinds of mental health problems in young adulthood, anxiety and depression.

We also see contextual factors like neighborhood, being able to promote effortful control and positive emotionality in these youth. These societal and structural factors are important in that development.

With that, I want to thank the collaborators who worked on this research with me, as well as extend a big thank you to the California Families Project families and staff who make all this research that we're talking about possible.

With that, I will pass along to our next speaker.

RICK CRUZ: Glad to be with everyone today. I'm glad to be with my colleagues, who have shared a lot of great information about the California Families Project.

Today I wanted to talk about acculturation processes, talking about risk and resilience for Mexican‑origin youth and caregiver mental health.

I'm at Arizona State University in the Department of Psychology. I'd like to start by acknowledging the California Families Project, the PIs and co‑PIs throughout the years who have been fantastic in terms of, I think, aiming to share data with researchers who are interested in this area, collaborate with researchers who are interested in this area to really disseminate these findings as widely as possible, make the dataset as available as possible but also considering privacy and confidentiality in the context of an underrepresented historically underserved group.

I wanted to acknowledge the study families who have really contributed tons of information about their lives for science. I think it's incredible to see their commitment to this work.

In terms of acknowledgments, I also want to acknowledge the National Hispanic Heritage Month, which just recently started. That might have been intentional timing but it's important to mention. I'm also available for questions if people have questions if people have questions at my email, rick.cruz@asu.edu.

I do want to add a few more statistics about Mexican‑heritage families and their relevance to public health, talk briefly about cultural orientation versus acculturation to related but two separate ideas.

I'll talk about adolescent cultural change and internalizing symptoms as part of the California Families Project data. If time allows, I have some bonus data looking at caregiver familism and depression symptoms. And I'll do a brief discussion.

So, I think you know this argument has been made so far but I wanted to just add that Mexican‑heritage youth and families really are crucial to public health in the United States. We know that there's around 38 million Mexican‑heritage people in the United States.

If we compare that to the next largest subgroup of Latinos, we have Puerto Rican heritage who make up a little less than 6 million people in the United States. So, this is a very large group. It's around 60 percent of the U.S. Latino population.

Then really, at this point, the census data shows that we're kind of at around or maybe even more than 10 percent of the total U.S. population are Mexican‑heritage according to American community survey data.

So, a large, large ethnic minority subgroup here. I also wanted to show the data that this is a map showing what is the largest Hispanic‑Latino subgroup in each of the different states. This light blue color here is showing people of Mexican‑heritage. So, you can see most states that it's the largest proportion of individuals in that state, including California where this data comes from.

Texas is the other large state where people are settled. 30 percent of Latinos are foreign‑born and thinking about this within‑group diversity is a crucial element of the California Families Project and the work that folks are doing with this data.

We also know that the Mexican‑heritage population tends to be younger on average. That's about a third of Mexican‑heritage individuals are under 18. That's nearly 12 million people in the U.S. are Mexican‑heritage under 18.

We also know that the median age is a lot lower relative to white non‑Hispanic. It's around 44 for white non‑Hispanic and just under 30 years for Mexican‑heritage individuals. We're talking about a younger population on average.

And this to me sort of makes an important point about the relevance of Mexican‑origin youth that this is an important population segment that we should be thinking about in terms of their risk.

Now, that also becomes more apparent when we look at the data on socioeconomic challenges. Families have had decades of challenges, higher rates of poverty. But a lot of these things were most evident to folks during the COVID‑19 pandemic.

A lot of people sort of were hearing information about this during the pandemic. An article published showing that COVID‑19 was having outsize impact on Latino families, Mexican‑heritage families in particular.

We saw economic stress highest for young parents, people with an income of under $25,000. Most people had less than $1,000 in savings during this time. Again, there were differences in terms of people's access to government programs that provided monies for childcare, for example, or child tax credits.

This is again compounding historical issues where Latino individuals had the slowest economic recovery following the 2008 recession, and that's one of the things that the California Families Project did well was timed to capture some of these challenges that happened with the 2008 Great Recession.

In general, we do know that there's disparities, for mental health and substance use risk for Latino youth, but some data shows that we see that same thing for Mexican‑heritage or Mexican‑origin youth as well.

So, we see increased likelihood of depression or mood problems, high rates of anxiety problems, somatic symptoms which can be linked with both anxiety and depression, but these are unexplained kind of physical symptoms that kids may experience.

We see increased suicidal ideation particularly for Latino girls. And when we talk about these problems, we see greater chronicity and impairment.

This is generally relative to white non‑Hispanic youth. That's the comparison I'm making there. We also see these risks in terms of early substance use. So LatinX Hispanic youth have the highest prevalence rates from substances in eighth grade. Some of the disparities do extend into later adolescence but some do disappear and questions of why that may change over time.

There's very, very limited data that look at Hispanic or Latino subgroups, but the limited data we do see shows Mexican‑heritage adolescents are at greater risk relative to other Latino Hispanic subgroups.

And even at similar levels of use, we see greater negative consequences among ethnic minority youth. For example, run‑ins with the law, for example. Youth are more likely to experience challenges from substance use in that domain.

One of the things we think about when we talk about within group diversity is, well, how much exposure to the U.S. may a person have experienced?

So, I talked about the number of people who are born in Mexico or different countries, for example, foreign‑born individuals who maybe migrated to the United States. And some people obviously were born here. Some families have been here for multiple generations, and the data shows ‑‑ this is across really a number of decades ‑‑ that greater U.S. exposure ‑‑ and this is in terms of again being born in the U.S. versus being born in Mexico ‑‑ the more time you spent if you're an immigrant, the more time you spent in the U.S. relative to those who spent less time in the U.S. ‑‑ number of different dimensions that we see greater exposure as related to increased likely suicide attempts, problematic alcohol use, cannabis use and other drug use.

Now this brings up some questions. We can get a sense of risk factors here, but it doesn't really help us to understand the why or developmental pathways that explain risk and resilience. A lot of the work I've done and really part of the reason that California Families Project was designed to look at these cultural factors was thinking about cultural change for those immigrant families in the United States. And ultimately those families are adapting to American culture in different ways, while also aiming to retain their heritage culture in some ways as well.

So, depending on where people settle and where they live, there a lot of different dynamics at play, but people are often juggling both of those.

When we talk about culture, we talk about three domains: Practices, behaviors, values, beliefs or attitudes, and number three, identification. So, this would be something like ethnic identity or American identity.

Acculturation, this idea of adapting towards American culture, becoming more American in some ways, typically examined as a risk factor.

Enculturation, that's the idea of being able to maintain or sort of take on more of your heritage culture. That's typically examined as a protective in literature, although there are some nuances there.

Now youth in this population segment, Mexican‑origin youth, really do face a balancing act of thinking about what to retain from their culture, what to learn about even, whether they have access to learning about their heritage culture versus being in the environment that's around them, which tends to be in kind of mainstream American culture, white mainstream American culture, having to juggle their language use practices, for example, cultural identity, their family obligations which tend to be stronger in traditional Mexican culture versus peer relationships and spending more time with peers.

Developmental transition that happens, but it may kind of look different or there may be different demands depending on a child's cultural milieu that they're in. That balancing act is one of the things I've been interested in.

Ultimately, a lot of the work from the California Families Project, a lot of the work I do is meant to inform intervention in Latino families and Mexican‑heritage youth. Then we can understand child development in cultural context, to help us think about culturally tailored targets and methods for prevention that can then develop into prevention intervention programs and at least maybe building existing programs.

We do have exemplar programs here at Arizona State University. Of course, there's great ones elsewhere, but I thought I'd highlight these. Bridges developed by Nancy Gonzales and colleagues. Keeping it Real by Flavio Marsiglia and colleagues. These are interventions that really took more general principles on prevention, but also combined that with information on cultural factors and cultural orientation that can help to then infuse intervention.

I'm going to really focus on this study just given the time. I wanted to briefly just talk about investigating longitudinal associations in cultural change and internalizing symptoms.

This is a paper that I published with, at the time, student authors and journal clinical child and adolescent psychology, and the question here was looking at cultural correlates for predicting risk and providing services. These are relevant things to consider and understand so we can improve how we identify youth who are at risk and providing them better services.

The key gap in the literature here was most of the research on cultural processes was cross‑sectional, especially at the time, and ultimately, when we have cross‑sectional data, that doesn't tell us much about acculturation or enculturation’s, which are by nature longitudinal processes.

I've been really interested in looking at modeling these things longitudinally to better capture what we think of as developmental processes over time.

And in this study, thinking about whether there might be parallel changes in internalizing symptoms as well. So, there's a lack of research on whether internalizing symptom development and cultural changes may occur in tandem.

What we're talking about here are two sets of trajectories. We're talking about trajectories in cultural orientation domain, like familism. That was mentioned, the idea of strong family bonds and being connected to family members. To what degree does that change? That varies among children. And internalizing symptoms.

We also saw another presenter that internalized symptoms trajectories also vary across individuals. So, the question here is, can we think about a potential correlation between trajectories and these two different domains?

So, I'm going to skip this slide just because we've talked about the California Families Project and kind of talk very briefly about the technical side of modeling this.

So, in this study I used, and our team used, latent basis growth modeling, type of latent growth modeling with free time scores.We have an intercept, where kids started out in our depression scores, for example. And a nonlinear slope that allows potential nonlinear changes between 10 and 17 years of age. The internalizing outcomes or depression symptoms and generalized anxiety disorder symptoms on the CDISC, a structured measure of youth mental health problems, and we looked at the symptom count. There are different ways we modeled this depending on what that distribution looked like.

I'm just going to talk about the results again briefly. So many different things we could talk about here. Hope to get to some of it in the Q&A.

First, what we did was we modeled differences in the average trajectories between boys and girls. So, there's a lot of research in this area. We wanted to just kind of document what was in the California Families Project.

For depression, in terms of average symptoms, we saw similar starting points in terms of depression symptoms. This is the count. This is years of age. And again, these are longitudinal trajectories, average longitudinal trajectories. Similar intercept but very clear difference in slope. Males tended to decrease over time, whereas girls tended to have a maintained level of depression over time on average.

For generalized anxiety symptoms, we saw that there was a higher starting point but no difference in the slope. The slope looked similar between boys and girls.

We also again think about within group diversity in terms of where someone was born. And so, for those youth who were born in Mexico, they had a slightly lower level of depression over time compared to youth who were born in the U.S.

So, this is what some people have termed the immigrant advantage. Again, the U.S. youth are here. So, their slopes kind of go down but then they're higher on average over time between the ages of about 12 and 17 relatives to youth born in Mexico. Again, we see an immigrant advantage in this respect.

Now, when we're talking about looking at parallel processes, we have a parallel process growth model that allows us to model both trajectories together. And so, we have, for example, a cultural dimension like language use, in particular, English language use. We can model where people, kids start out, how they change over time, and try to connect that with how kids change in terms of their depression symptoms over time as well.

And again, we're looking at between‑individual variability and their slopes and the association in that. We looked at multiple cultural processes, English and Spanish use, familism values, traditional gender roles, and ethnic pride, available at different ages, but generally between 10 and 15 or 17.

Now I'm going to show a couple of busy pictures here, busy charts. Let me break these down briefly. I have the finding up top. This is kind of the overall take‑home.

In these figures, what I'm showing is males and females in separate panels. We had the slope. This is the estimated slope of Spanish use here in this left‑hand side; familism on the right‑hand side.

We have the slope of the outcome, which would be major depression symptoms on the Y axis for both. So again, we're dividing it by child sex or gender. We have two different cultural dimensions we're looking at and we're looking at the association between that cultural dimension and major depressive symptoms.

So, we can see that in this we have a negative association between the slope of Spanish use and the slope of major depression for both boys and girls, the mark for familism slope.

I'm kind of illustrating boys and girls just to show the average differences that I showed before. When we talk about correlation between slopes, we start to get into a little bit of a tricky kind of interpretation because it does matter if those slopes are positive or negative.

We can say that, well, as a slope becomes more positive, in Spanish use we tend to see a more negative slope in major depression. But it's kind of hard to really know what that means. I created these guides to kind of help you to understand where those slopes are more positive or negative.

In this corner we see both negative and‑‑ negative slopes for Spanish use and major depression, and that again may help you to kind of think about are we talking about growth or are we talking about decreases in terms of those trajectories. But again, overall, we see those steeper decreases in Spanish use and familism resulted in more positive slopes for depression overall.

We also see similar findings for ethnic pride. And we see that that's associated with more positive slopes for both depression and anxiety.

For boys and girls, we didn't model any differences in slopes here because, as I showed you from the figure, there's no differences in the results between boys and girls here.

Another finding that we had was the prospective effect. So, age 10 culture values predicting change over time and anxiety symptoms. We saw that greater endorsement of traditional gender roles at age 10 was associated with steeper decrease in anxiety symptoms over time. That's another kind of interesting finding that hadn't been shown before.

Now let me talk about some conclusions from the study we were thinking about. Ultimately the big take-home conclusion is we see internalizing symptom development and aspects of cultural orientation are associated over time, that there's something about cultural orientation development or acculturation and enculturation, associated with internalizing symptom change. Greater maintenance of Spanish language use and familism were associated with less problematic depression trajectories.

Greater maintenance of ethnic pride was associated with steeper declines in depression and anxiety as well. Early adherence to traditional gender roles were again a protective effect for generalized anxiety symptom trajectories.

There are different reasons why this might be the case. There may be something about children's maintenance of Spanish use may help to improve communication with their parents or caregivers, extended family, or it might just reflect other protective parenting or help attributes within their social network.

Familism maybe is likely associated with improved family relationships, that are beneficial for mood and well‑being. Maybe something about social support in there.

And then Latino youth have high early endorsement of traditional gender roles, they find their attitudes are a more optimal fit with the expectations in the cultural environment around them.

And then they may face lower adjustment difficulties over time because of that. So, I'm going to just kind of go on to this overall discussion briefly.

One of the things that I think is especially important in Hispanic Heritage Month is to kind of talk about the research findings overall.

This is really kind of throughout the literature but especially the California Families Project. Data that in general maintaining heritage culture is protective for Mexican‑heritage youth and for Latino youth more broadly. It is important to consider cultural profiles. I was really looking at one dimension of cultural identity at a time, but when we looked at the literature that looks at those together, we see that bicultural orientation really has the most robust evidence as a protective cultural profile.

Able to sort of navigate mainstream American culture but also being able to hold onto, maintain and leverage a person's heritage Mexican cultural orientation or background as well.

The research here, as mentioned, may not generalize across Latino subgroups or into other areas of the United States. But what I've tried to do is put a greater focus on the longitudinal processes in relation to the cultural orientation trajectories rather than just looking at that cross‑sectionally.

A lot to do with potential mechanisms. And I mentioned briefly the prevention intervention implications, but I'm happy to move on to the next speaker here, Dr.Amanda Guyer.

Thank you for your time.

AMANDA GUYER: Thank you. Thank you again for having us here today. It's really a privilege to be able to share our research with a broad community. I'm going to be focusing in my talk on contextual influences on the brain and mental health outcomes.

I'm a professor at UC Davis, and I also codirect the Center for Mind and Brain. So, you will be hearing a little bit about the brain in my talk.

It's long been recognized, and you've been hearing a lot about it, that adolescence is really known to be a period of risk for the development of mental health problems. And as you can see here on the left, many disorders, including substance use, anxiety and mood disorders, they typically onset in the adolescent years.

On the right are some lifetime prevalence rates of mental illness among adolescents which indicate that nearly 50 percent of adolescents have ever been diagnosed with a mental health illness.

But why? So why is it that some teens are doing well while others struggle? And what is it that's driving this? One of the contributing factors that I, along with many others, have been examining is what the brain's role in the risk for developing mental health problems during adolescence might be.

And as you saw on the graphs, this is really a time where there's a lot going on here. So, one of the hypotheses developed out in the field to help explain some of these patterns really comes from our understanding that a still developing brain, the idea of a brain being in flux may be more vulnerable or respond differently to the environment, including to stressors that it encounters, that an individual encounters.

And it's that idea that when a system, a biological system, in this example, is in flux, there are these windows of opportunity for change that become open.

But so too does vulnerability, particularly in this case to mental health problems. And so, to understand better adolescent mental health, it's important to consider both contributions of the brain as well as youth's experiences and then the interactions or interdependencies of those two variables.

So, one of the ways in which we've been testing this is through studying the adolescent brain in context. It's been guided by the idea that there are individual differences in the way the brain responds to social contexts and experiences.

And, of course, susceptibility of this type can occur at any age or developmental phase, but adolescence might be a pivotal time to examine these kinds of effects of the brain because it's really this period, as we just discussed, of significant brain development. It's really second to the period of infancy in terms of changes that we've learned over decades of research now that are occurring in the brain.

But we also know that in adolescence there's a heightened sensitivity to social contexts. As we've already discussed, there's increased onset of psychopathology. So, piecing these three knowns together really helps to motivate this focus.

So, we've been examining different aspects of brain function, brain structure and areas that are particularly relevant for emotion processing or cognitive control and looking at them oftentimes as a moderator, looking at interaction effects. Sometimes maybe to test some specificity, we also might look at the brain as a mediator in terms of its ability to explain why two variables are related to each other.

So, we've been examining these features of the brain in the context of adolescents' experiences in their environments, their social relationships and mental health problems, such as aggression or depression.

And so, in considering the brain in this way, it might help enhance our ability to identify those adolescents who at risk for negative outcomes given these types of brain‑based susceptibilities and the environmental demands and experiences that they encounter.

So as you've heard a lot about the California Families Project, for over a decade I've been a part of this team studying the role of risk and protective factors in mental health outcomes through multiple linked longitudinal studies, one of which included a neurobiological study, a brain and body functioning that my colleague Paul Hastings and I have been running since the sample approached about mid‑adolescence as you can see in the timeline.

As you can see in our substudy focused on neurobiology, we included two MRI scans about two years apart as well as assessments of physiology throughout the study visits.

We included some focused mental health questionnaires, but also have used the amazing range of survey data available from the parent study that covered youth experiences across multiple domains.

So, I wanted today to share two examples based on this neurobiology project that provide examples of how the family and environmental context together with the brain related to mental health for adolescence. In doing so, we've been really working to identify different brain circuits as well as specific environmental stressors that might potentially be targets that we can focus on in helping to reduce risk for mental health problems.

As a first example, again this work is really guided by this idea that some individuals are sort of known to be susceptible or sensitive to their environment. This might be through different genetic, temperament or physiological factors that are really instantiated by the central nervous system.

So specifically, how are these susceptible or sensitive individuals might be doing poorly in stressful or difficult environments because of that sensitivity, but also do well in supportive or positive environments, again because of that sensitivity to the environment.

Those who are maybe less susceptible or sensitive might be less influenced by the environment, whether it's positive or negative. In this first study we selected the hippocampus as an initial marker for susceptibility for depression.

This was really based on evidence from animal work, for example, that has found that mice with larger hippocampus before social stress show more withdrawal after a stressor is introduced to them.

Human adolescence, there's also evidence showing that youth with larger hippocampal volume have shown higher levels of depression in the context of experiencing high levels of aggression in their exchanges with their mothers, but low depression where there were low levels of maternal aggression.

So, we focus, as you can see here on the right, of quantifying the size of the hippocampus region in the sample. In this study, also importantly, we selected both a positive context and this is specifically the degree to which adolescents felt connected to their families reflecting that cultural value of familism that's been discussed. We also selected a negative context, specifically here the degree to which adolescents were exposed to crime in their communities.

So, I want to just turn your attention to the graph on the left, where here we found support for that idea that hippocampal volume moderated the relation between that endorsement of family connection and adolescent depression symptoms. So that is, for those adolescents with a larger hippocampal volume that is marked by that darker line in the graph, that at high levels of family connection, they also reported having low levels of depression symptoms. And at low levels of family connection, you can see here there's a higher level of depression symptoms that were reported.

In the graph on the right, the context was community crime. And in this case, again, we saw that for those adolescents with the larger hippocampal volumes who also experienced high exposure to community crime, the depression symptoms were at the highest level.

This suggests perhaps that hippocampal volumes might be one of these brain‑based factors that's sensitive to family and community context, in trying to understand adolescent susceptibility to experiencing depression.

In a second example, we looked at a different null factor. In this case it was neural response when adolescents were thinking about how sad another person's expression of sadness, which you can see depicted on the right side of the slide here, adolescents, while they were experiencing that MRI scan of their brains, were showing different pictures of different emotional faces and they were asked to think how sad does this person make you feel, specifically of these sad expressions on the actors that they saw pictures of.

We also focused on specific parts of the brain engaged when adolescents were thinking about other people's sadness that really play a role in processes such as empathy, mentalizing, self‑perception and emotion.

Again, we also looked at community crime exposure. But this time the outcome of focus was adolescents' aggressive behaviors. What we found was positive association with community crime and aggression fighting was especially strong for those adolescents with low activity, which is represented by the solid lines in this figure here.

So low neural response when thinking about how others' sadness made them feel. This was particularly true in the regions I've noted here, temporal parietal junction, also known as TPJ, posterior cingulate cortex, PCC, as well as the amygdala.

So again, those adolescents with that lower neural response in these regions, while thinking about another person's emotional experience, was related to or was related to higher levels of aggression, particularly in that context of experiencing high levels of community crime.

However, those adolescents with low neural activity ‑‑ I'm sorry, with higher neural activity and low crime exposure had lower levels of problems. And community crime at either level had little association with aggression or fighting for adolescents with the high level of activity in these brain regions, as you can see here by the dashed line.

So again, the results from this study indicate that having this lower neural activity in this process involved in mentalizing and thinking about another person's feelings might be susceptibility factor, especially in exposure to a highly stressful kind of contextual experience here noted by community crime.

But those youth who have a higher level of reactivity, thinking about this, appear to be less influenced, so to speak, by that environment, when we're trying to understand aggression as the outcome.

So, one takeaway from the study is that it may be more that neural engagement when reflecting on how other people's emotions make you feel might buffer that relation between the environmental risk factor and aggression problems.

Sort of rendering this idea about introspection or thinking about other's emotions as maybe a neural cognitive mechanism that might alter the susceptibility to these kinds of risks.

Okay. I just provided these two examples from our work, really trying to look at the intersection of the brain and social context to advance our understanding of depression and externalizing behaviors.

In recent work, we have also looked at other outcomes that are significant public health issues, including substance use, suicidality, which also typical onset in adolescence.

As a first example I listed here, in another neuroimaging study, we looked at the brain's response to the experience of social exclusion. This is a significant social stressor, particularly for adolescents. It's common.

So, in this study, we found that adolescents who have high levels of anxiety coupled with high levels of brain response to social exclusion showed this increase in their use of substances over a period.

So, one interpretation of this finding is that when this sort of brain sensitivity to a social stress is also coupled with anxiety, adolescence might be seeking substances to reduce these feelings of distress that are related to social stress.

In another study, we examined emotion regulation. And this is a key process in depression. We also looked at anhedonia, a key symptom of depression.

And from this study, we considered the context of simpatia, which emphasizes expressing positive emotions and inhibiting negative ones.

What we found here was that adolescents who really were suppressing positive emotions potentially in contrast to help with possibly were raised with the values in their families had higher levels of anhedonia. Again, a symptom of depression.

And then finally we've also been examining patterns and risks involved in youth, of reports of suicidal thoughts and/or behaviors, or STBs.

And in an initial study we have found published recently that being female assigned at birth and being of later generational status was related to an increasing prevalence of STBs across many years of the adolescent period. We also found that family conflict was associated with increased STBs but greater familism predicted less STB reports over time among the sample.

So, this brings me to this sort of summary slide. I shared some examples related to how adolescents' contextual experiences relate to aspects of the brain, influencing their adjustment, as well as trying to highlight some specific social contexts that are involved in mental health outcomes for these youth and some of the ways the research is helping to advance knowledge here particularly about a group that's received less attention in neuroscience research are a few that I've listed here.

So first, taking this kind of approach, it's been helping us to identify youth that might be at particularly high risk for mental health problems. In this case, it's really been a way in which we've been able to capture maybe some of the more subtle aspects of cognition or of emotion that can be more difficult to measure with questionnaires that are more ‑‑ we can tap into perhaps with our brain scanning measures and some of the other kinds of tools and methodologies that we use in doing so.

In a second way in which we've been trying to advance our understanding in these areas, we've also been able to detect that a specific context is being influential on adolescent mental health, again including ones that might be missed otherwise had we not considered the brain in our studies as an example.

We also hope that this work will provide some new clues about what social contextual kinds of inputs can really help adolescents manage their thoughts and their emotions more effectively.

Our hope is that collectively we've really tried to reveal some specific social processes that might be used to inform design of interventions throughout risk in adolescence, and we've found some specific contextual factors that have promotive effects.

We really want to make sure that we're focusing on those as well to maintain them and continue those protective effects. Where we've found specific factors that increase risk, we might want to find ways to modify or at least better support youth experiencing such risks through interventions that are tailored to account for these different variations that we have identified here.

So, with that, I'm going to close with acknowledging my collaborators and trainees, as well as the donors funding that we've received in support of conducting this research and I appreciate your attention, and I think that we can perhaps open for questions at this point. Thank you so much.

TATIANA MEZA‑CERVERA: Thank you very much. I'm monitoring the Q&A. But I can start us off on longitudinal studies are very difficult, right, to make sure that participants keep coming back. So, I wonder what strategies were used?

Your attrition rates were low, which is impressive, and I think that that's something that research can really learn from. So, what were some of the strategies that you used to ensure that your participants kept coming back?

AMANDA GUYER: I can throw a little bit of answer to that. So, one thing is that the project has engaged with the sample all throughout the years through things like newsletters, birthday cards, sharing some of the findings that we've been finding. Really creating connections through the staff that work on the project so that families feel comfortable; they get to know the study, project staff, which is also a very important component to this kind of longitudinal research.

And always kind of, I think, working hard to keep communication lines open, ensuring that records are up to date with contact information and so on. So those are some of the strategies that have been used. If there are others I missed, colleagues, please add in.

TATIANA MEZA‑CERVERA: Thank you.

JOHNNA SWARTZ: Those were the main ones I was going to say, too.

TATIANA MEZA‑CERVERA: Another question that ‑‑ so we talked a lot about internalizing. So, I saw a question asking more about, like, behavioral outbursts or externalizing, was that one of the measures that was collected, and did you see any association between early discrimination and later externalizing behaviors?

AMANDA GUYER: In one of the studies that I presented; we did look at aggression/fighting as an outcome. Not looking so much at discrimination in that study. Again, I think that's an important area to focus on.

I think another piece to kind of keep in mind is that we see different ‑‑ and Dr. Cruz's work also highlighted how important it is to look at these behaviors over time because we also know that different mental health problems kind of ebb and flow at different ages.

It might be more common that we see aggression and fighting in certain ways at younger ages, earlier in adolescence and so forth. Some of that might sort of emerge in a different form later in adolescence.

So, some of the acting out we might see earlier, we might see in a different capacity later, but maybe there's an essence in terms of behavioral control that's underlying different presentations at different ages.

RICK CRUZ: To add to that, the California Families Project did collect phenotypic data on the behavioral symptoms on the problems and there's extensive data on these things. I don't think any of us presented on it specifically. But I imagine that's in the large portfolio of publications that are out there that someone has done that. I know I personally haven't done that yet.

And I think the other thing is that I have looked at substance use as a sort of behavioral, more behavioral outcome, risky decision‑making, risky behavior, and the data does tend to show kind of a similar set of effects that I presented for internalizing, but again Mexican‑heritage culture tends to be protected, and taking on American culture tends to be a bit more risky but it depends on what dimension you're looking at.

TATIANA MEZA‑CERVERA: Sorry, I'm trying to read the chat as well. But let's see here.

I think Dr. Cruz, you answered this one, but somebody asked regarding if there was a difference between Mexican‑born families that come from either border towns or those that are more isolated regarding some of these outcomes. I didn't see your answer, but did you collect data regarding where families were coming from?

RICK CRUZ: The California Families Project does collect some of sort of where in Mexico the family originated from. That's not something I personally looked at in my work. One of the things that is just kind of a brief aside is that we do start to get into this interdisciplinary research when we get to culture and immigration.

We kind of are spanning sociology and demography and anthropology in some ways. So those are important questions and may be very relevant to the things we're talking about, but not something I looked at in my study.

TATIANA MEZA‑CERVERA: Thank you. So, there was a question regarding parents' mental health concerns and if that impacts the children regarding intergenerational traumas and youth outcomes over time.

I know there is also the California Babies Project that kind of will start to ‑‑ so that's something that people can, if you're interested in that, people can investigate that. I don't know if somebody wants to‑‑ I just know about it briefly, but if you have a little more information on where that might be.

RICK CRUZ: I can just add that parents were tracked over time as well. Number of studies have looked at that. But in general, that's researched a bit less than adolescence, mental health and well‑being and to now emerging adulthood.

California Babies Project is another project I'm not associated with that one, but I did just kind of want to point out the fantastic data that's been collected here, the rich data, the connection the families that have been made over time where families that participated in the original California Families Project, those youth now are having children in their 20s into their 30s are still participating and providing data on their lives.

So, this is something that really kind of, I think, mapped onto some of the work that Rand Conger did, one of the original PIs of this work, and his Iowa Families Project. Iowa Families Project really looked at the sort of multigenerational effects we might think about. That's where those data are kind of going to help us better understand that.

TATIANA MEZA‑CERVERA: Great.

JOHNNA SWARTZ: I'll add briefly for the California Babies Project, Dr.Leah Hibel is the director of that project. I'll try to drop a link in the Q&A for those who want to follow that project to the website to look at papers coming out of the project and that's following the babies. So, the youth have now grown up, so the babies of the participants have grown up now.

TATIANA MEZA‑CERVERA: Great. I know the youth are now young adults really, right, they're having their babies, and so there was a question regarding services, were services provided to them or were there resources where they could reach out and get services for some of these mental health things?

KAILEY LAWSON: Yeah, I'm happy to speak to that. After every interview, participants were paid, compensated for their time, and they were also sent extensive resources local to where they were based. And if any of them were interested in help getting connected to those resources, folks at the California Families Project were happy to make those connections because ensuring participant well‑being is important.

TATIANA MEZA‑CERVERA: Thank you. I do see we're at time, but I just want to say thank you all so much for agreeing to be part of this. I believe this is one of the first webinars that has focused on Mexican‑origin youth, and so it's really cooled to be a part of it, especially during Hispanic Heritage Month. So, thank you all for attending, and this concludes our webinar. Have a great rest of your afternoon.