Among Latinx American families, parents’ familism values predict a variety of their children’s academic outcomes, including school disengagement (Stein & Polo, 2014). However, given that adolescent brain development is sensitive to sociocultural input (Foulkes & Blakemore, 2018), it is unclear how cultural values such as familism interact with youth’s neural systems to shape their academic adjustment. Therefore, the present study examined the longitudinal effects of parents’ familism values on Latinx American youth’s school disengagement, with attention to the moderating role of youth’s neural sensitivity to personal reward. Data were obtained at baseline (T1) and one-year follow-up (T2) of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study (N=1916). The Monetary Incentive Delay (MID) task was used at T1 to assess youth’s ventral striatum activity during reward processing (i.e., reward anticipation and receipt) (Casey et al., 2018). In addition, parents reported their familism values at T1 (Knight et al., 2010), and school disengagement was reported by youth at both T1 and T2 (Zucker et al., 2018). Analyses indicated that parents’ familism values predicted youth’s lower school disengagement one year later over and above their baseline school disengagement and demographic covariates (β = –.07, p = .008). Moreover, it was shown that among youth who exhibited low activity in the left ventral striatum during reward processing, parents’ familism values predicted youth’s lower school disengagement one year later (b = –.47, p < .001). This association was not observed for youth who displayed higher neural activity during reward processing (b = .02, p = .88). Authors:
Varun Devakonda, Northwestern University, United States
Zexi Zhou, The University of Texas at Austin, United States
Yang Qu, Northwestern University, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Mr Varun Devakonda is a University Doctoral Student at Northwestern University , United States

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