Poverty And Brain Cortex Are A Correlational Study

Literature on the effects of low socioeconomic status (SES) on one’s psychological well-being is well established. Prior studies show that low-SES not only impacts individuals’ mental well-being, but also affects their children’s developmental trajectories. This paper reviews one of these numerous studies and further discusses the influences of parental SES on one’s life outcomes, as well as intergenerational mobility and achievement gap through a developmental perspective.

Neurodevelopment results from an interaction of biologic, social and psychological factors. Social disadvantages, parental educational level, lack of family support, and history of drug abuse can have negative impact on a child’s development. These difficult to control confounding variables should be taken into consideration when interpreting results from studies on socially disadvantaged population such as Medicaid patients (62, 66). Moreover, Medicaid recipients have been particularly prone to an increased incidence of behavioral/developmental disorders than the general population (62).

“Environmental influence during the first few years of life is crucial to all later abilities, especially intellectual ones”(Lightfoot et al., 2013, p.437). In the United States many children don’t receive an excellent education due to living in neighborhoods that are economically poor, typically where many minority children grow up. Children usually learn through social enhancement, imitation and explicit instruction that are provided in their culture from their families. The children who come from low-income backgrounds are found to do poorly in subjects, as well as standardize testing. Some thoughts are whether standardized testing discriminates against ethnic minority students and students from low income backgrounds, which usually rank below from other students in other socioeconomic status.

To start, little is actually known about the importance and effect of timing of poverty on children’s psychological development. Economic deprivation during different phases and time frames of childhood can also alter the outcome of the child. Studies that have been done about children's early cognitive and physical development suggest that family income in the first five years of life has the most

This chapter is intended to “review the history of SES and provide an overview of the association between SES and children's well-being for three major domains of development (cognitive, socioemotional, health)” (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002, p.372). Since it is a more of a review of knowledge already published than a study in itself, the methodology included reviewing prior studies. Their search ended in finding that there is an extremely complex relationship between socioeconomic status and cognitive attainment that may not always be seen in a concrete answer. Where some researchers argue that specific cognitive skills are reliant on family income and others are completely independents, different researches assert the opposite. Something they mentioned that I would like to consider in my study is the relationship between socioeconomic status and attendance. Bradley and Corwyn (2002) say “SES also appears to affect school attendance and number of years of schooling completed” (p.378). While these two aspects have enough information to be a study of their own, they do play a role in my personal

It is to be said in a new research that was done, showing that “low-income kids” aren’t developed fully in certain parts of their brains and behind other kinds in their same age group. The results of this came to be that children that come families with a low income household, happen to have a thinner neocortex, which is a “particular area of the brain” and its role is in memory and the ability to learn (Woodruff.) This is something that should really concern people, because children are our future. How and why is this happening? Well it’s all based from the nutrients, the health care, the education, and the amount of stress they enter counter, that affects children’s lives and this is all caused by Income Inequality. “The brain of a child whose family earns less than $25,000 annually is 6% smaller in surface area than a child whose parents earned more than $150,000, according to the study” (Woodruff.) Which is very surprisingly but sadly it makes sense, since children who grow up in an environment where that have access to things that children from low income environments

Poverty affects the health of a child, which undesirably impacts the development process. Scientist have ran many tests to support the argument that poverty does effect a child’s brain development. Seth Pollak, a child development researcher, and his team analyzed nearly 1000 MRI scans of rather diverse children from all over the U.S between 2001 and 2007. Making sure to exclude individuals who were born from risky pregnancies, complicated births and subjects who had a family history of mental illness. The MRI scans revealed that the areas of the brain that were affected by environmental influences and academic

Something that got my attention that Brain Mueller said during the Thrive Family Business Conference was how prominent poverty is in our community. His view of poverty is that God never intended for it, but it is an effect of our rebellion from God through sin. I have never thought of poverty in the sense of sin. I grew up in a very privileged suburb in Colorado and only dealt with poverty when I would go to Downtown Denver. I am surrounded or effected by poverty a lot more since attending Grand Canyon University. Having this culture shock has taught me to appreciate what I have and my opportunities. God has blessed me a lot in my life with a great family, house, and life. I have amazing parents who have taught me to do well for myself, the

Growing up in poverty has a significant effect on the brain. While poverty affects many aspects of the brain processing, spending patterns are impacted which affects quality of life. Occasionally, those in poverty make it out. Despite gaining a higher socioeconomic class, quality of life can still be influenced by the impact of poverty. This is because those who grew up in poverty continue their impulsive spending habits when they move into the middle-class because poverty leaves an enduring impression on the human brain.

For example, the article it states, “childhood poverty may also lead to brain changes that influence mood and risk of depression” WORKCITE’. Therefore, at times child whose parents are living in poverty sometimes might be working two jobs to make it, so at times the child isn’t getting enough attention to help the child’s brain development.

The development of children can depend on many factors, one of the important ones being socioeconomic status (SES). SES can be defined as a multidimensional construct, including measures of social factors such as power, prestige and hierarchical social status, and economic resources (Hackman and Farah, 2009). Child development can be studied from multiple dimensions such as physical, mental, social, and emotional development among others. For the purposes of this study, I will be focusing on how socioeconomic status affects child cognitive development.

Feldman, R (2011). Development Across the Life Span (6th ed.). New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc.

In today's world, some only have one reason on how poverty can be explained but there are certain psychology methods that can go into depth on poverty. Throughout all the different types of countries they all experience the struggle of their economy and people being in poverty. There are different perspectives that poverty can be possibly explained and why it happens in the world. People have been announcing and declaring different possibilities on how poverty is in the world; ranging from 1938 to 1989. The different perspectives of psychology are psychoanalytic, behavioral, humanistic, cognitive, biological, and sociocultural.

Debates on the relationship between birth order and intelligence have been remaining controversial. Birth order is considered as a person's ranking by age among his or her siblings. There have been numerous researchers studying about this subject to find whether firstborns generally have a higher IQ scores than their siblings. Some scientists conclude that birth order strongly influents intelligence; however, others oppose to this, claiming that birth order has no effect on intelligence. In this paper, my study deals with the birth order effects on intelligence.

Socioeconomic status (SES) is one of the most widely studied constructs in the social sciences. Several ways of measuring SES have been proposed, but most include some quantification of family income, parental education, and occupational status. Research shows that SES is associated with a wide variety of health, cognitive, and socioemotional outcomes in children, with effects beginning prior to birth and continuing into adulthood. A variety of mechanisms linking SES to child well-being have been proposed, with most involving differences in access to material and social resources. For children, SES impacts well-being at multiple levels.