Children who view their homes, schools, or neighborhoods as threatening may be more likely to develop mental health difficulties as they grow older. A large-scale study published in Psychological Medicine suggests that these perceptions of social danger are linked to changes in brain connectivity during early adolescence, which in turn predict symptoms like anxiety, depression, and attention problems months and even years later.
Adolescence is a time of rapid brain development and increased vulnerability to mental health issues. In recent years, youth mental health problems have become more prevalent, raising concerns among health professionals and researchers alike. While many studies have explored how negative social environments affect children’s emotional well-being, fewer have investigated how these experiences shape brain development and contribute to later mental health outcomes.
The new study was led by Dimitris I. Tsomokos of University College London and King’s College London, alongside Divyangana Rakesh, also based at King’s College London. Co-authors include Henning Tiemeier from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and George M. Slavich from the University of California, Los Angeles.
The researchers were guided by Social Safety Theory, which proposes that humans are biologically wired to detect safety or threat in their environments. When children frequently experience conflict, instability, or danger, their brains may respond in ways that are adaptive in the short term but potentially harmful over time. These biological changes might influence how the brain processes emotions and stress, eventually leading to difficulties such as depression, anxiety, or attention problems.
To better understand these processes, the researchers focused on how children’s perceptions of social threat relate to functional connectivity between major brain networks involved in self-reflection, attention, and emotional regulation. They also tested whether these brain patterns could explain why children who perceive social threats are more likely to develop mental health problems later.
“This study grew out of ongoing conversations among the four of us. With Slavich, I had been working on applying Social Safety Theory to child and adolescent mental health. This theory suggests that social safety (trust, belonging, and warm, supportive relationships) promotes health, while social threats such as conflict, exclusion, or rejection harm health and development,” Tsomokos explained.
“At the same time, Rakesh and I were discussing how perceived threats in the social environment might shape brain connectivity during early adolescence, and how this could be tested in the large Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development dataset. Together with Tiemeier, who has worked on these topics in the past, we examined how children’s perceptions of threat across multiple social environments (home, school, and neighborhood) relate to brain connectivity and later mental health.”
The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study is a long-term project involving over 11,000 children across the United States. From this larger group, the researchers selected nearly 8,700 participants who had usable brain imaging data and completed surveys at multiple time points.
When the children were around 10 years old, they were asked to report on their experiences of conflict at home, feelings of safety at school, and whether they felt safe in their neighborhoods. These three areas were combined into an overall score reflecting perceived social threat. The researchers also collected resting-state brain scans at this age, which measure how different brain regions communicate when a person is not actively engaged in a task.
The team focused on five major brain networks known to play a role in emotional and cognitive processes: the Default Mode Network (which is active during self-focused thought), the Frontoparietal Network (involved in decision-making and regulation), the Dorsal Attention Network (related to goal-directed attention), the Cingulo-Opercular Network (which helps maintain focus), and the Salience Network (which detects important stimuli and helps switch between other networks).
Analysis showed that higher levels of perceived social threat were associated with reduced internal communication (or connectivity) within the Default Mode and Frontoparietal Networks. In addition, there was increased communication between networks that typically operate more independently, such as between the Default Mode and Dorsal Attention Networks. These shifts suggest that the brain’s internal organization may become less distinct in children who feel socially unsafe.
“When children feel exposed to conflict or unsafe/unstable situations in their family, school, or neighborhood, they are more likely to develop symptoms of mental health problems later on,” Tsomokos told PsyPost. “We found that these experiences are linked to changes in brain connectivity even before symptoms appear, suggesting that the brain may carry part of the imprint of these early social threats.”
To test whether these brain patterns were meaningful, the researchers examined whether they predicted mental health symptoms reported by the same children six months and 30 months later. Indeed, lower connectivity within certain networks and greater connectivity between others were linked to higher levels of problems like anxiety, depression, and attention difficulties. These brain differences appeared to partially explain how early perceptions of social threat translated into later psychological symptoms.
The findings were especially notable in children who reported unsafe neighborhoods. In this group, reduced connectivity within the Default Mode Network and increased connectivity between the Default Mode and Dorsal Attention Networks were particularly strong predictors of mental health issues. This pattern held even when controlling for other factors such as sex, parental education, family income, and parental mental health.
“The effects were statistically reliable but modest in size,” Tsomokos explained. “In practice, this means that, although perceived social threats are an important piece of the puzzle, the brain connectivity patterns we identified explained only a small portion of the overall effect. Still, even small effects can matter at the population level, especially when you consider how common perceived social threats are during childhood unfortunately and how long-lasting their impact can be.”
When the researchers broke down the types of symptoms, they found that brain connectivity differences were most closely linked to internalizing problems (like sadness or anxiety) and attention problems. The same patterns were not found for externalizing problems such as aggression.
Interestingly, when the different sources of social threat (family conflict, school unsafety, and neighborhood unsafety) were analyzed together, family conflict emerged as the strongest overall predictor of later mental health problems. However, only neighborhood unsafety was associated with distinct changes in brain connectivity, suggesting that different types of threats may impact mental health through different pathways.
While the study offers important insights, some limitations are worth noting. First, the findings are based on children’s perceptions rather than objective measures of threat. While perception is itself important, future work could benefit from comparing self-reports with official records, such as reports of bullying, crime statistics, or family involvement with child services.
In addition, the observational nature of the study means that causality cannot be confirmed. It is not possible to say for certain whether perceptions of threat cause changes in brain connectivity or whether some other factor, such as pre-existing temperament or genetics, may contribute to both.
Nevertheless, the study adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that children’s experiences of their social environments leave measurable marks on brain development. Future studies could explore how these findings relate to brain activity during emotional or cognitive challenges, which may provide additional clarity about how perceived threats shape mental processing.
The study, “Social threat, neural connectivity, and adolescent mental health: a population-based longitudinal study,” was published September 18, 2025.
