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. 2025 Oct 27;20(1):nsaf111. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsaf111

What’s the harm? Examining police contact and amygdala reactivity among black adolescents

Deaweh E Benson 1, Heidi B Westerman 2, Vonnie C McLoyd 3, Colter Mitchell 4, Christopher S Monk 5, Luke W Hyde 6,✉
PMCID: PMC12634413  PMID: 41143562

Abstract

A growing literature links various experiences of adversity to brain activity, particularly in regions that support threat processing and the stress response (e.g. the amygdala). However, this work has not considered racialized adversities and the extent to which specific experiences (e.g. police contact) may be uniquely salient for marginalized communities (e.g. Black adolescents). In a sample of 131 Black adolescents, we found that a history of police contact was associated with heightened amygdala reactivity when viewing neutral faces. Activity was specific to the Basolateral (BL) subregion, a region involved in hypervigilance. Police contact uniquely contributed to amygdala activation over and above cumulative measures of threat and social deprivation experiences traditionally studied in adversity literature. This study highlights police contact as a form of racialized adversity that is important to consider when elucidating the neurobiological embedding of adversity, particularly among marginalized youth.

Keywords: amygdala, adversity, police, fMRI, race, adolescence

A growing literature using human and animal models emphasizes that exposure to early adversity can become embedded in the brain and contribute to poor mental and physical health (Benmhammed et al. 2019, Sheridan and McLaughlin 2020, Ellis et al. 2022). An extensive body of work, including the widely cited dimensional model of adversity and psychopathology (DMAP), indicates that adverse experiences (e.g. physical abuse) are associated with distinct brain activity in various neural circuits underlying threat and socioemotional processing (Sheridan and McLaughlin 2020, Berman et al. 2022, Webb et al. 2024). Many studies have specifically focused on the amygdala given consistent evidence documenting its role in fear learning and multisensory threat detection—marking the amygdala as a key region of interest in investigations exploring the potential neural embedding of threat-related adversities (LeDoux 2007, Tottenham and Sheridan 2009, Pereira and Moita 2016, Hein and Monk 2017).

Importantly, existing neuroimaging work often fails to consider that exposure to adversity is not randomly distributed in our society. Although Black youth are disproportionately exposed to adversity, the growing literature investigating the biological embedding of adversity has paid little attention to racialized adversity (Bernard et al. 2021, Dumornay et al. 2023). Racialized adversity emphasizes that race and racism shape the type, severity, and consequences of adversity exposure (Joseph-McCatty et al. 2023). Compared to their peers from other ethnic–racial groups, Black youth report greater exposure to the forms of adversity traditionally studied, in addition to forms of adversity that are less often reflected in conventional literature, such as racial discrimination and police surveillance (Wade et al. 2014, Bernard et al. 2021). By failing to consider how childhood adversity is racialized, the current literature has understudied adverse experiences that are particularly relevant to marginalized Black youth such as contact with the police (Kerrison et al. 2018, Del Toro et al. 2019).

Youth contact with police is not often included in neurobiological investigations of childhood adversity even though police brutality has long been entrenched in developmental contexts and is associated with adverse health outcomes among Black youth (Jindal et al. 2022, Flynn et al. 2024, Salami et al. 2024). Modern policing can be traced to slave patrols (Brucato 2020), and historic trends of racialized police killings perpetuate present-day realities in which Black Americans remain more likely to be killed by the police than any other ethnic–racial group (Nodjimbadem 2020, Singyawe 2024). Existing work highlights that frequent police contact is a health risk, such that adolescents who report greater police contact exhibit poorer mental and physical health (McFarland et al. 2019, Turney 2021). Research also demonstrates that the health consequences of police contact extend to youth who were not personally stopped, but even to those who report witnessing or hearing about someone else being stopped by the police (i.e. vicarious contact; Turney 2022). One qualitative study of young Black males conducted by Smith Lee and Robinson (2019) illuminates the emotional consequences of police contact with one 19-year-old respondent stating, ‘My number one fear in life is the police’.

Biopsychosocial models such as Clark et al. (1999) model of racism as a stressor for African Americans contend that racism becomes biologically embedded by initiating psychological and physiological stress responses that contribute to poor health outcomes over time (Williams 1997). Thus, we conceptualize police contact as a threatening form of adversity, as well as one aspect of institutional racism (e.g. racialized adversity embedded in the policies and practices of societal institutions) due to proactive policing policies (e.g. stopping and searching individuals upon officer discretion) in many urban cities that result in Black adolescents experiencing disproportionate police contact (Jackson 2021, Jahn et al. 2023, Needham et al. 2023). Although the amygdala has traditionally been recognized for its involvement in determining relative danger in one’s environment (Tottenham and Sheridan 2009, Whalen and Phelps 2009), additional research is needed to illuminate whether exposure to police contact is related to amygdala activation among Black youth. Existing research has largely documented associations between adversity exposure and heightened amygdala reactivity (Hein and Monk 2017, McLaughlin et al. 2019), but some studies have documented blunted associations (Harnett et al. 2019, Huggins et al. 2022). Differences in whether adversity is linked to heightened or blunted amygdala reactivity may be due to the operationalization of adversity, variations in developmental periods under investigation, sample demographic characteristics, and analytic approaches across studies (Tottenham and Gabard-Durnam 2017, Saarinen et al. 2021), highlighting the need to expand this work to a form of racialized adversity that may be perceived as threatening.

Current study

The proposed study investigates whether police contact is related to amygdala reactivity among Black adolescents when viewing emotional faces during an fMRI task. Adolescence is a key developmental transition characterized by increased opportunities for police contact as youth explore their neighbourhoods and undergo rapid brain development (Hinton 2016, Guyer et al. 2023). Given that the amygdala is a heterogeneous structure with subregions that serve distinct roles (Hyde et al. 2016, Michely et al. 2020), we examine whether any associations between adolescent police contact and the amygdala are specific to the basolateral versus central medial amygdala subregions. Based on lesion and microcircuitry studies with animal samples, the basolateral (BL) region is considered the main input structure receiving sensory information from the prefrontal and hippocampal regions and is thought to play a role in maintaining prolonged preparedness to threat (Davis et al. 2010). The central medial (CM) region is considered the main output structure sending signals to the brainstem and hypothalamus, and is thought to drive behavioural and physiological responses to immediate threat and initiate the HPA axis stress response (Swanson and Petrovich 1998, Lin et al. 2011). In line with prior work using the emotional faces fMRI task to examine adversity exposure, we examined amygdala reactivity to threat (i.e. fear and angry faces > baseline) and neutral (neutral faces > baseline) stimuli (Hyde et al. 2011, Gard et al. 2018, Roberts et al. 2022). We examine neutral faces in light of research indicating that neutral faces may be interpreted as threatening (Lee et al. 2008).

Additionally, to isolate the unique effects of police contact on amygdala reactivity, we adjust for potential confounding factors including mother education at birth, household poverty ratio at birth, teen gender, pubertal status, and birth city. Notably, we include composite measures of threat (e.g. physical abuse) and social deprivation (e.g. child neglect) exposures to assess whether police contact relates to amygdala function over and above conventionally studied forms of adversity. Finally, we conduct sensitivity analyses using youth antisocial behaviour (e.g. rule-breaking, aggression) as a covariate to rule out the potential explanation that youth with greater amygdala reactivity engage in greater antisocial behaviour and thus have more contact with the police (Hyde et al. 2014). We examine these aims within a population-based sample of Black youth at age 15, with enrichment for youth from low socioeconomic backgrounds. We hypothesize that police contact among Black adolescents will be related to greater reactivity in the amygdala when viewing threat and neutral emotional faces. Moreover, given prior research documenting that police surveillance is related to hypervigilance in Black communities (Smith et al. 2019), we also expect greater reactivity in the BL amygdala subregion than the CM subregion. Additionally, in line with behavioural research highlighting that youth with direct police contact experience greater health consequences, we expect that adolescents who were personally stopped by the police (i.e. direct contact) would have greater amygdala reactivity than adolescents who were not personally stopped (i.e. vicarious, no contact; Jackson et al. 2019, McFarland et al. 2019). Finally, given existing work illuminating the long reach of police stops, we also predict that adolescents who witnessed or heard about someone they knew being stopped by the police (i.e. vicarious contact) would exhibit greater amygdala activity than adolescents who had no contact with the police (Jackson et al. 2022).

Method

Participants

The current study analyses data provided from youth and their caregivers who participated in the Future Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS). FFCWS is a birth-cohort study of 4898 children born in large US cities between 1998 and 2000 (Garfinkel et al. 1998). The study oversampled (3:1) for non-marital births in medium to large US cities, which resulted in a sample with a high proportion of economically disadvantaged families with diverse ethnic and racial identities (Koss et al. 2020). At the time of birth, the average annual household income of the focal children was below $33 000, 34% of mothers had less than a high school diploma or equivalent, and 48% of mothers self-identified as Black.

At age 15, 237 adolescents and their caregivers participated in the Study of Adolescent to Adult Neural Development (SAND), which is a neuroimaging study of a subsample of FFCWS youth from Detroit, Toledo, or Chicago. 65% of the adolescents sampled were born in Detroit and 76% self-identified as Black. In order to assess police contact and amygdala reactivity among Black youth, the current study focuses on an analytic sample of 131 Black adolescents with usable neuroimaging data (see Table S1 for exclusions). Several studies have been published using amygdala reactivity data collected in SAND (Gard et al. 2018, Goetschius et al. 2020, Hein et al. 2020, Roberts et al. 2022), and an even wider array of publications have investigated police contact and behavioural outcomes in the full FFCWS sample (Del Toro et al. 2019, Jackson et al. 2019, McFarland et al. 2019, Turney 2021). However, no studies to date have examined amygdala reactivity and police contact.

Procedure

Parents provided written consent, adolescents provided verbal assent, and all families were compensated for their participation in the SAND study. The study protocol was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Michigan. Youth and their caregivers participated in a day-long protocol that included an fMRI scanning session.

Data acquisition and pre-processing

Blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) functional images were acquired from adolescents while in a GE Discovery MR750 3 T scanner with an 8-channel head coil. Whole-brain functional T2* weighted BOLD images (TR = 2000 ms, TE = 30 ms, flip angle = 90°, FOV = 22 cm, slice thickness = 3 mm, 64 × 64 matrix, 40 axial slices) were collected using a reverse spiral sequence, which has been shown to improve signal recovery in limbic regions (Glover and Law 2001). Anatomical images were homogeneity corrected using SPM12, and then skull-stripped using Brain Extraction Tool in FSL (version 5.0.7; Jenkinson et al. 2012).

Functional data were pre-processed in the following steps: (i) removal of large temporal spikes in k-space data (>2 SD), (ii) field map correction and image reconstruction using customized code developed in MATLAB, and (iii) slice-timing correction using SPM12 (http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/). Functional images were realigned to the anterior commissure–posterior commissure (AC–PC) plane to the mean volume of the time series to address head motion. Functional images were also coregistered to high-resolution structural scans, normalized into the MNI image space, and smoothed using an isotropic 8-mm full width at half maximum Gaussian kernel.

fMRI task

During the scanning protocol, participants completed an implicit emotional faces processing event-related fMRI task. In this task (Fig. 1), participants were presented with an emotional face and asked to identify the gender of the face presented (by pressing their thumb to indicate male or their index finger to indicate female). The emotional faces presented were taken from the NimStim set of facial expressions (Tottenham et al. 2009), and were counterbalanced for gender (i.e. male, female) and race (i.e. White, Black).

Figure 1.

Figure 1.

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Implicit emotional faces processing fMRI Task. BOLD fMRI data was acquired during the implicit emotional faces processing task which utilized the NimStim set of facial expressions (Tottenham et al. 2009). Participants were presented with an emotional face and asked to identify the gender of the face presented.

Participants were shown 20 pseudo randomized trials of each of the following emotions: fearful, happy, sad, neutral, and angry (100 total trials). Each trial consisted of the following steps: (i) fixation cross (500 ms), (ii) emotional face (250 ms), (iii) blank screen during which participants identified the gender of the emotional face (1500 ms), and (iv) a second blank screen displayed at a jittered inter-trial interval of either 2, 4, or 6 s. The total task time was 9.63 min.

Measures

Amygdala reactivity

Amygdala reactivity was assessed using BOLD fMRI data acquired during the implicit emotional faces processing task. Single-subject BOLD fMRI data were included in the final analyses according to following criteria: (i) Motion: Outliers were defined as having greater than 2 mm movement or 3.5° rotation, identified using the Artifact Detection Tools (ART) software package (http://www.nitrc.org/projects/artifact_detect). Outlier volumes were regressed out of the participant’s individual model using spike regression (Oppenheimer et al. 2020), (ii) signal coverage: Minimum of 70% signal coverage in the left and right amygdala, and (iii) task accuracy: Participants had to achieve task accuracy above 70% on the fMRI task. Reactivity was examined using a mask of voxels in a combination of the whole amygdala and two subregion masks [i.e. basolateral (BL), central medial (CM)]. The whole amygdala mask, which had a total voxel extent of 1,013 voxels, was defined by utilizing Analysis of Functional NeuroImages (AFNI’s) 3dcalc tool to combine the bilateral amygdala mask from the Automated Anatomical Labeling (AAL) atlas in the WFU Pickatlas tool with the BL and CM subregion cytoarchitectural ROIs (Cox 1996, Maldjian et al. 2003). The BL and CM subregion ROIs were defined using maximum probability maps of cytoarchitectonic boundaries and implemented through the SPM Anatomy Toolbox (Amunts et al. 2005, Eickhoff et al. 2005). The BL and CM had a total voxel extent of 647 and 125 voxels respectively.

Police contact

At age 15, the FFCWS survey asked youth a series of binary (yes/no) items about police contact. In line with existing FFCWS studies (Geller 2021, Jackson 2021), the current study utilizes an ordinal variable of police contact with three levels: direct contact, vicarious contact, and no contact. Adolescents were coded as having experienced direct contact if they answered affirmatively to the item, ‘Have you ever been stopped by the police while on the street, at school, in a car, or some other place?’ Youth were coded as experiencing vicarious contact (only) if they did not report being personally stopped by the police, but endorsed the following items, ‘Have you ever seen someone stopped by the police in your neighborhood/school?’ and ‘Do you know anyone who has been stopped by the police?’ Finally, youth were coded as having no contact if they did not endorse any of these items (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Demographic characteristics of Black adolescent sample.

Full Black sample*  
 fMRI sample
n = 181
 n = 131
Mean (SD)/n (%) Range Mean (SD)/n (%) Range
Police contact Direct = 49 (27%) Direct = 32 (24%)
Vicarious = 110 (62%) Vicarious = 87 (66%)
No Contact = 20 (11%) No Contact = 12 (9%)
Age at interview 15.4 (.54) 15–17 15.39 (.52) 15–17
Age at first police stop 13.38 (1.51) 9–15 13.45 (1.57) 9–15
Teen gender Boy = 81 (45%) Boy = 56 (43%)
Girl = 100 (55%) Girl = 75 (57%)
Pubertal status M = 3.23 (SD = .58) 1.33–4.00 M = 3.24 (SD = .59) 1.33–4.00
Mother education (baseline) Less than HS = 60 (33%) Less than HS = 43 (33%)
HS degree = 57 (32%) HS degree = 42 (32%)
Some Coll = 49 (27%) Some Coll = 34 (26%)
College or Grad = 15 (8%) College or Grad = 12 (9%)
Poverty ratio (baseline) M = 1.7 (SD = 1.93) 0–10.20 M = 1.7 (SD = 1.79) 0–10.20
Birth city Detroit = 132 (73%) Detroit = 97 (74%)
Other city = 49 (27%) Other City = 34 (26%)
Threat exposure M = .06 (SD = .51) −.83 to 2.16 M = .07 (SD = .54) −.83 to 2.16
Deprivation exposure M = .03 (SD = .51) −.77 to 2.67 M = .05 (SD = .53) −.77 to 2.67
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*

Demographic characteristics did not significantly differ between the full and analytic samples. Reporting chi-square test results for categorical variables and t-test results for continuous variables. Police contact: (χ2 (2, N = 179) = 5.27, P =.07); teen gender: (χ2 (1, N = 181) = .77, P = .38); pubertal status: t(179) = −.50, P =.62); baseline mother education (χ2 (3, N = 181) = .72, P = .86); baseline household poverty ratio t(179) = .30, P =.76); birth city (χ2 (1, N = 181) = .30, P = .58); threat exposure t(179) = −.68, P = .49); deprivation exposure t(179) = −.61, P =.54).

Covariates

We included mother education, poverty ratio, gender, puberty, and environmental exposures to threat and deprivation as covariates which reflect critical dimensions of development or structural inequalities. We also included antisocial behaviour as a covariate in subsequent sensitivity analyses. Mother education was assessed based on mother self-report of educational attainment at the birth of the focal child. Values range from 1 (less than high school) to 4 (college or graduate school). Poverty ratio was measured with a continuous indicator of the ratio of the maternal report of total household income to the official poverty thresholds as designated by the US Census Bureau one year prior to the maternal interview at birth. Gender was accounted for using self-report at age 15. Puberty was measured based on adolescent responses to the Pubertal Development Scale which measures changes in height, body hair, skin, and gender-specific changes (e.g. breast development; Petersen et al. 1988). Responses were coded on a 4-point Likert scale ranging from 1 = no development to 4 = completed development. Item responses were averaged so that higher mean scores corresponded with greater pubertal development. Birth city was included to account for potential confounding sampling differences based on the location of the focal child’s birth. In the current study, 73% of Black adolescents were born in Detroit so we classified birth city as either 1 = Detroit, MI or 0 = Other City (i.e. Toledo, OH, Chicago, IL).

Composite measures of previous threat and deprivation exposures in childhood were created using FFCWS data collected at ages 3, 5, and 9 (Hein et al. 2020). Threat exposure included (i) Caregiver reports of emotional and physical child abuse (e.g. whether primary caregiver had ‘hit [focal child] on the bottom with an object’; Parent-Child Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS-PC; Straus 1979), (ii) Caregiver reports of intimate partner violence (e.g. whether ‘[partner] slapped or kicked you’; Hunt et al. 2017), and (iii) Caregiver reports of witnessing and experiencing the following types of violence: beatings, attacks with a weapon, shootings, and killings. Deprivation exposure included aspects of social deprivation including (i) Emotional and physical child neglect (e.g., caregiver was so drunk or high that [they] had trouble taking care of focal child (CTS-PC; Straus 1979)), (ii) Maternal report of romantic partner support (e.g. insults or criticizes you; Manuel et al. 2012), and (iii) Caregiver report of neighbourhood social cohesion (e.g. people in this neighbourhood generally don’t get along; Donnelly et al. 2016).

Antisocial behaviour

Antisocial behaviour (AB) was measured with a multi-informant, multi-method dimensional latent measure previously established in prior studies using the SAND sample and linked to amygdala reactivity (Dotterer et al. 2020, Murray et al. 2023). The AB latent factor included indicators from three scales: (i) youth reported Self-Report of Delinquency (Elliott et al. 1985), (ii) parent reported rule-breaking and aggression subscales of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL; Achenbach 1991), and (iii) clinician-rated lifetime conduct disorder and oppositional defiant disorder symptoms from the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School-Age Children diagnostic interview (K-SADS; Kaufman et al. 1997).

Analyses

Three conditions were modeled in the general linear model of SPM12: threat (angry + fearful faces), neutral faces, and the baseline fixation cross. The contrasts of interest were threat vs. baseline and neutral vs. baseline. We first conducted analyses examining police contact and reactivity using the whole amygdala mask. Next, we examined police contact and reactivity using the BL and CM amygdala subregion masks. Then, we conducted t-tests to assess differences in amygdala reactivity between the levels of police contact (e.g. direct vs no contact). Finally, we conducted sensitivity analyses that included the antisocial behaviour covariate.

We used a 3dClustSim correction within SPM12 to account for multiple comparisons using the program 3dttest++ which randomizes and permutes input datasets to simulate noise volumes which are then sent to 3dClustSim directly (Forman et al. 1995, Cox 1996). We utilized version 16.1.14 of 3dClustSim in AFNI which uses a Monte Carlo simulation to provide thresholds that achieve a family-wise error (FWE) correction threshold of P < .05 within each statistical model. A voxel-wise threshold of P < .005 was used, resulting in cluster sizes of k = 1–17 depending on the contrast and resulting smoothness estimate.

Results

Descriptive results

There were no significant differences in reported police contact or any of the study covariates between the full sample and the final analytic sample with adequate amygdala coverage (Table 1). Most Black adolescents (66%) included in the analytic sample reported experiencing vicarious police contact (i.e. witnessing or knowing someone who had been stopped), 24% reported direct contact, and only 9% reported no contact with the police. Boys were more likely to experience direct contact (i.e. personally stopped by the police) than girls (χ2 (2, N = 131) = 16.23, P = .001). There was no significant difference in household poverty between adolescents who experienced police contact and those that did not [F(2,128) = .74, P = .48]. Demographic characteristics for the full and included analytic sample are reported in Table 1. Zero-order correlations for the analytic sample are reported in the Supplement (see Table S2).

Police contact and amygdala response to threatening and neutral emotional faces

Consistent with our hypotheses, results indicated that police contact was significantly related to greater reactivity in the left amygdala when viewing neutral faces compared to baseline with and without covariates (see Table 2; Fig. 2). Contrary to our hypotheses, there was no significant association between police contact and amygdala response to threat stimuli.

Table 2.

Police contact is associated with increased amygdala activation among Black adolescents when viewing neutral faces compared to baseline.

Left amygdala
 Right amygdala
Peak coordinates
 Peak coordinates
n k T x y z k T x y z
Police contact 131 40 4.14 −30 −6 −20
Police contact w/covariates 131 43 4.31 −32 −6 −20
Police contact w/covariates and AB sensitivity analyses 131 44 4.25 −32 −6 −20
Left BL Amygdala
 Right BL Amygdala
Peak coordinates
 Peak coordinates
n k T x y z k T x y z
Police contact 131 39 4.14 −30 −6 −20
Police contact w/covariates 131 42 4.31 −32 −6 −20 8 3.02 36 0 −22
Police contact w/covariates and AB sensitivity analyses 131 43 4.25 −32 −6 −20 8 3.07 36 0 −22
Left CM Amygdala
 Left CM Amygdala
Peak Coordinates
 Peak Coordinates
n k T x y z k T x y z
Police Contact 131 No suprathreshold clusters
Police Contact w/covariates 131
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k = number of voxels within the cluster. Significant clusters were identified in SPM12 using amygdala masks. False-positive rate is controlled across the amygdala using 3dClustSIm for cluster-level correction (P<.005, α<.05). Extent thresholds for whole amygdala: k > 13; BL amygdala: k > 7; CM: amygdala k > 0. Associated t and peak voxel coordinates in MNI space (x, y, z) shown above. Covariates included mother education, poverty ratio, gender, puberty, exposure to threat and deprivation, and antisocial behaviour.

Figure 2.

Figure 2.

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Whole amygdala activation. Police contact is associated with heightened activation in the whole amygdala when viewing neutral emotional faces compared to baseline. Associations between police contact and amygdala reactivity remained after accounting for mother education, poverty ratio, gender, puberty, and environmental exposures to threat and deprivation. Left: k = 43, z = 4.15, MNI = −32, −6, −20.

Police contact and amygdala subregion response to neutral emotional faces

To better understand the regional specificity of the results linking police contact to amygdala reactivity to neutral faces, we examined these associations again with BL and CM region of interest masks. Results indicated that police contact was associated with increased activation in the left and right BL subregion when Black adolescents viewed neutral faces compared to baseline (see Table 2; Fig. 3). In contrast, police contact was not significantly related to activation in the CM subregion.

Figure 3.

Figure 3.

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Basolateral amygdala subregion activation. An examination of amygdala subregions indicated that police contact is associated with increased activation in the BL subregion when viewing neutral emotional faces compared to baseline. Associations between police contact and BL reactivity remained while controlling for mother education, poverty ratio, gender, puberty, and environmental exposures to threat and deprivation. Left: k = 42, z = 4.15, MNI = −32, −6, −20; Right: k = 8, z = 2.96, MNI = 36, 0, −22.

Levels of police contact and amygdala reactivity

Next, we assessed whether the type of police contact contributed to amygdala activation. We split the police contact ordinal variable into three categories (i.e. direct, vicarious, no contact) to conduct three separate t-tests. As hypothesized, we found that Black adolescents with direct police contact (e.g. were personally stopped) exhibited greater amygdala activation than those with no police contact when viewing neutral faces. Black adolescents with direct police contact also had greater amygdala activation than those with vicarious contact (e.g. witnessed or heard about someone they knew being stopped; see Table 3). Contrary to our hypotheses, there were no significant difference in amygdala activation between Black adolescents with vicarious contact and those with no police contact. Similar patterns emerged in the BL subregion (see Table 3).

Table 3.

Adolescents with direct police contact exhibited significantly greater amygdala activation (in the whole amygdala and the BL amygdala) than adolescents who were not personally stopped when viewing neutral faces compared to baseline.

Left amygdala
 Right amygdala
Peak coordinates
 Peak coordinates
n k T x y z k T x y z
Direct vs no contact 44 40 3.94 −28 −6 −24 28 3.86 36 0 −22
Direct vs vicarious 119 52 4.22 −32 −6 −18
Vicarious vs no contact 99 No suprathreshold clusters
Left BL amygdala
 Right BL amygdala
Peak coordinates
 Peak coordinates
n k T x y z k T x y z
Direct vs no contact 44 39 3.94 −28 −6 −24 19 3.86 36 0 −22
Direct vs vicarious 119 51 4.22 −32 −6 −18 8 2.73 34 0 −20
Vicarious vs no contact 99 No suprathreshold clusters
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k = number of voxels within the cluster. Significant clusters were identified in SPM12 using amygdala masks. False-positive rate is controlled across the amygdala using 3dClustSIm for cluster-level correction (P<.005, α<.005). Extent thresholds ranged from k > 5 to k > 17 for the respective t-tests. Associated t and peak voxel coordinates in MNI space (x, y, z) shown above. All t-test analyses include covariates: mother education, poverty ratio, gender, puberty, and exposure to threat and deprivation.

Sensitivity analyses

After accounting for antisocial behaviour, the relationship between police contact and activation to neutral faces in the whole amygdala and the BL subregion remained significant (see Table 2).

Discussion

Black youth disproportionately experience police contact and are more likely to experience harsh language, frisks, and searches during police stops than youth from other racial backgrounds (Geller 2021). As a consequence, Black youth who are personally stopped or know others who were stopped by the police exhibit greater risk of mental and physical health sequelae (McFarland et al. 2019, Jindal et al. 2022). The current study extends existing literature on adversity and neurobiological development by demonstrating that police contact, an institutional form of racialized adversity, is related to heightened amygdala reactivity among Black adolescents when viewing neutral faces. Interestingly, this activation was specifically located in the basolateral amygdala which is implicated in vigilance (Davis et al. 2010, Terburg et al. 2012). Importantly, these associations were significant over and above forms of adversity conventionally studied in the literature such as exposure to threat (e.g. abuse) and social deprivation (e.g. neglect), as well as other potential confounders (e.g. level of antisocial behaviour; Hyde et al. 2016, McLaughlin and Sheridan 2016). These results highlight police contact as a salient racialized adversity that is important to consider in the literature elucidating the neurobiological embedding of adversity exposure.

The current study utilized an event-related emotional faces processing fMRI task and focused on threat (i.e. fear and angry faces) and neutral faces vs. baseline contrasts. As hypothesized, police contact was significantly related to increased amygdala activation among Black adolescents when viewing neutral faces. This result aligns with prior research indicating that neutral faces may be processed as potentially threatening (Cooney et al. 2006, Lee et al. 2008). Contrary to expectation, amygdala activation to threat was not related to police contact. This may indicate that the effects of police contact may not increase reactivity to more overt forms of threat (e.g. fearful, angry emotional faces) but is instead related to stimuli that may be more ambiguous or less overtly threatening (e.g. neutral faces Blasi et al. 2009). This pattern complements existing research which emphasizes that racial profiling experiences are often difficult to decipher, and the toll of interpreting these events may lead to more wear and tear on bodily systems over time (Guyll et al. 2001, Dovidio et al. 2005, Hall and Fields 2015).

The present study also highlights the importance of anatomical specificity. As predicted, police contact was significantly associated with activation in the BL amygdala subregion. These findings indicate that when presented with neutral stimuli, Black adolescents who experienced police contact exhibited greater activation in the amygdala subregion that is recruited for remaining vigilant (Whalen and Phelps 2009, Davis et al. 2010). These findings are consistent with existing work documenting that Black adults exposed to police violence demonstrated heightened vigilance and poorer health outcomes (Alang et al. 2017, Smith et al. 2019). We did not find evidence that police contact was significantly linked with activation in the CM amygdala subregion, which is involved in driving physiological responses to immediate threat (Whalen and Phelps 2009, Davis et al. 2010). Given the relatively small CM region of interest, it is unclear whether these null findings reflect a true lack of associations or a lack of power. Future work should replicate these analyses in a larger sample and consider using a smaller smoothing kernel to further explore associations between police contact and amygdala subregions.

Our primary finding that adolescent police contact was significantly associated with heightened amygdala reactivity lends support for Clark et al. (1999) biopsychosocial model of racism as a stressor for African Americans which postulates that racialized adversity entrenched in the policies and practices of societal institutions may trigger bodily stress responses among racially marginalized groups. Future research should extend these findings with longitudinal investigations examining whether associations between police contact and amygdala reactivity among Black youth remain heightened across the lifespan and explore whether police contact precedes and predicts changes in amygdala reactivity over time. Notably, the relationship between police contact and amygdala function among Black adolescents remained significant even with an extensive set of controls. Police contact was significantly related to amygdala activation over and above measures of poverty, threat, social deprivation, and antisocial behaviour which addresses concerns that associations between police contact and amygdala reactivity are confounded by unmeasured experiences of other adversities and/or evoked by greater antisocial behaviour (Sheridan and McLaughlin 2014, Dotterer et al. 2017, Hein et al. 2020). Although the current study would be underpowered to examine interactions with study covariates, one important future direction could involve an investigation of whether the neurobiological implications of police contact differ between high or low poverty neighbourhoods.

Though the current study had several strengths including an examination of an understudied racialized adversity in a population-based sample of Black youth during a critical developmental transition, the current study has important limitations. First is the relatively small sample size. Though the original SAND cohort (N = 237) has a modest sample size, after neuroimaging quality controls and a focus on the subsample of Black youth, as well as an uneven pattern of exposures (e.g. low numbers of Black youth with no police contact), cell sizes were smaller than ideal. Second, the use of a cross-sectional design and the reliance on youth self-report of police contact means that we cannot address the direction of effects or neighbourhood-level police presence. Future work could bolster these findings by using longitudinal data and examining community-level data on policing. Third, our focus was on the amygdala specifically, given its central place in adversity-brain research. Future work should examine other regions likely involved in processing race-related stress, such as the prefrontal cortex, investigate connectivity with other relevant regions, and employ multivariate approaches (Webb et al. 2024).

Additionally, we classify adolescents as having direct contact if they reported ever being stopped by the police—and we do not further specify if that stop included harsh treatment (e.g. racial slurs, physical force). We found that amygdala activation was driven by Black youth with direct contact, which suggests that the historic and present-day fears associated with police surveillance in Black communities may lead Black adolescents to experience a police stop as an emotionally salient event regardless of whether the stop included intrusive officer behaviour (Smith Lee and Robinson 2019). Future work should examine how the severity of police stops may differentially relate to neurobiological function. Furthermore, the FFCWS police contact items do not capture exposure to media depictions of policing, and an important prospective line of research should investigate how adolescents’ media exposure to police contact relates to neurobiological function. Additionally, the current study also refines its focus on police contact among Black adolescents as an institutional form of racism, however future studies should consider the role of multiple aspects of structural racism—the multifaceted manner in which societies foster racialized adversity through mutually reinforcing systems such as policing, education, housing, and health care (Dean and Thorpe 2022, Hardeman et al. 2022).

Taken together, these results highlight that police contact is significantly related to heightened amygdala activation to neutral faces among Black adolescents, particularly in the BL amygdala subregion which is involved in vigilance. These results lend support to growing scholarship articulating a need to better attend to racialized adverse experiences in childhood adversity literature (Bernard et al. 2021, Jackson 2021). The current study results coupled with insights from existing behavioural research on policing can contribute to future social neuroscience research informing public policy focused on reducing harm and improving the health and socioemotional functioning of Black youth (Steinberg 2009).

Supplementary Material

nsaf111_Supplementary_Data
nsaf111_supplementary_data.zip (22.5KB, zip)

Contributor Information

Deaweh E Benson, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, United States.

Heidi B Westerman, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, United States.

Vonnie C McLoyd, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, United States.

Colter Mitchell, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48104, United States.

Christopher S Monk, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, United States.

Luke W Hyde, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, United States.

Author contributions

Deaweh Benson(Conceptualization [Lead], Data curation [Equal], Formal analysis [Lead], Investigation [Lead], Methodology [Equal], Visualization [Lead], Writing—original draft [Lead], Writing—review & editing [Supporting]), Heidi B Westerman(Data curation [Equal], Formal analysis [Equal], Methodology [Equal], Software [Equal], Visualization [Supporting], Writing—review & editing [Supporting]), Vonnie McLoyd(Conceptualization [Supporting], Funding acquisition [Lead], Supervision [Supporting], Writing—review & editing [Supporting]), Colter Mitchell(Funding acquisition [Lead], Project administration [Equal], Writing—review & editing [Supporting]), and Christopher Monk(Funding acquisition [Lead], Project administration [Lead], Resources [Equal], Writing—review & editing [Supporting]), Luke Hyde(Conceptualization [Supporting], Data curation [Supporting], Formal analysis [Supporting], Funding acquisition [Lead], Investigation [Supporting], Project administration [Equal], Resources [Equal], Supervision [Lead], Writing—original draft [Supporting], Writing—review & editing [Lead]).

Supplementary data

Supplementary data is available at SCAN online.

Conflict of interest: We have no conflicts of interests to disclose.

Funding

The research reported in this manuscript was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, T32HD007109 (McLoyd & Monk), R01MH130158 (Monk), and F31MH131373 (Westerman). We would also like to acknowledge the past work of the Future Families and Child Wellbeing Study, the families for sharing their experiences with us, and the project staff for making the study possible.

Data availability

The complete list of measures and data is publicly available for both the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study through the official study website (https://ffcws.princeton.edu), and the Study of Adolescent Neural Development through the National Institutes of Mental Health data archive (https://nda.nih.gov/). We are happy to share data upon reasonable request.

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Associated Data

This section collects any data citations, data availability statements, or supplementary materials included in this article.

Supplementary Materials

nsaf111_Supplementary_Data
nsaf111_supplementary_data.zip (22.5KB, zip)

Data Availability Statement

The complete list of measures and data is publicly available for both the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study through the official study website (https://ffcws.princeton.edu), and the Study of Adolescent Neural Development through the National Institutes of Mental Health data archive (https://nda.nih.gov/). We are happy to share data upon reasonable request.

Articles from Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience are provided here courtesy of Oxford University Press

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