Experiencing poverty during childhood may prompt experience-dependent neural adaptations. These manifest through functional connectivity patterns across networks thought to support cognitive and socio-emotional processing. Interrelated network connectivity disruptions have been associated with the development of internalizing disorders. Connectome-wide network characterizations of functional connectivity in adolescents who grew up in poverty are lacking. To this end, this dissertation aimed to characterize the association between family material hardship, connectome-wide network connectivity and internalizing symptoms in adolescence. The introductory chapter proposes material hardship, which directly measures a family's experiences with unmet basic needs (e.g., no access to food) as a better alternative to income-based measures used in research. Subsequently, in Chapters Two and Three, network contingency analyses were conducted to characterize connectome-wide connectivity associated with lifetime family material hardship for adolescents drawn from a national longitudinal study. Correlational analyses evaluating the association between network connectivity and current adolescent internalizing symptoms were done. Notably, the mixed findings across the two studies suggest that connectome-wide adaptations confer both cost and benefits to youth who experienced material hardship. Data suggests that altered network connectivity may be protective and that not everyone who experiences material hardship develops internalizing symptoms. In the final chapter, the limitations and implications of the present findings are discussed. Recommendations for more multi-method research to better characterize the association between brain function and poverty are made.PHDPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/167916/1/jaimemv_1.pd
