# Adolescent responses to varying environments in virtual reality simulations

> **NIH NIH R21** · UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA · 2020 · $201,006

## Abstract

PROJECT ABSTRACT
Although exposure to adversity in childhood and adolescence is an important predictor of subsequent physical
and mental health, not enough is known about how adolescents respond to stressful and adverse environments
and how they “get under the skin” to influence health and development. Neighborhoods are one such important
adolescent environment, as neighborhood disadvantage is associated with early emerging disparities in health
and development that may set the stage for the accumulation of poor health and development over time. There
are many important pathways by which neighborhoods may influence health over the life course, including health
behaviors and challenging physical, social, and service environments. Perceiving neighborhoods as stressful
may be one such mechanism by which neighborhood environments “get under the skin” to influence health.
Neighborhood environments may have both acute influences on stress-related processes, but also may have
lifespan effects due to the chronic, cumulative effects of repeated exposures and the long-term toll of adapting
to adverse neighborhood environments. Such adaptation may take the form of either habituation or sensitization
to neighborhood-related stressors over time. However, assessing neighborhood influences on stress and
emotion is methodologically challenging. There are no standardized neighborhood exposures that have been
used to determine that exposure to neighborhood characteristics can elicit differences in stress and emotion.
Moreover, while advancements in mobile technologies to measure functioning in context are important, in these
studies exposures cannot be standardized and controlled, and testing chronic stress hypotheses would require
extensive longitudinal measurement. Consequently, alternative design strategies are needed to clarify the role
of stress in neighborhood effects. This study develops such a novel, alternative approach to address these
issues by deploying a virtual reality (VR) based model of neighborhood disadvantage and affluence that creates
an immersive experience approximating the experience of being in different neighborhoods. In this study, this
model will be applied to understand neighborhood effects in a diverse sample of adolescents (n = 130) from a
range of disadvantaged and affluent neighborhoods. The proposed study will employ a randomized experiment
(n = 65 per condition), to determine (a) if virtual exposure to neighborhood disadvantage elicits differences in
emotion and stress reactivity; (2) if growing up in a disadvantaged neighborhood results in habituation or
sensitization to different neighborhood characteristics; and (3) if chronic stress results in habituation or
sensitization to different neighborhood characteristics. This research will develop an innovative methodology
that will help establish the role that neighborhoods may play in eliciting stress as well as the processes of
adaptation to chronic stress and chronic neighborhood...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9998020
- **Project number:** 5R21HD099596-02
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
- **Principal Investigator:** Daniel A Hackman
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $201,006
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2019-08-16 → 2023-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9998020

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9998020, Adolescent responses to varying environments in virtual reality simulations (5R21HD099596-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9998020. Licensed CC0.

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