Socio-cultural factors that influence developmental trajectories might contribute to the varying rates of mental illness onset, proportion, and severity across countries [4]. As exemplified in Fig. 1, socio-cultural factors could lead to specific environmental conditions that constrain developmental trajectories. For example, cultures emphasizing social cohesion (left panel) could promote multigenerational living conditions (middle panel) that facilitate social interactions. Such interactions could accelerate the development of the socio-emotional brain circuits supporting cognition and behavioral processes (right panel) [5], in turn, promoting resilience to certain mental illnesses. However, multigenerational living conditions may also increase familial stress when coupled with higher rates of neighborhood poverty, conferring risk for other mental illnesses (middle panel). Thus, similar socio-cultural and environmental factors may lead to different developmental outcomes. By investigating neurobiological and behavioral trajectories within a socio-cultural context, researchers can identify individual and cumulative factors that contribute to the development of mental illness within different groups or individuals.

We share three recommendations to promote the investigation of socio-cultural factors in psychiatric neuroimaging research. First, researchers should empirically test hypotheses to quantify how different socio-cultural factors influence developmental trajectories by, for example, testing how a given factor (e.g., degree of social cohesion; Fig. 1) modifies the association between a brain index and psychopathology symptoms. Testing such hypotheses can promote the development of conceptual frameworks describing which and how socio-cultural factors shape developmental trajectories.