This isn’t in the interest of defending my hypothesis
Just a subject of interest with a focus on brain imaging and neuroscience which is where I think the conversation should be held (even if it’s more challenging)
Basically what we have here is evidence that not only does poverty cause health concerns related to stress but that health concerns related to stress also cause poverty creating an inescapable feedback loop
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4464202/
Quote:
poverty is associated with poor mental health (Wadsworth et al., Forthcoming), and childhood poverty increases the risk of major depression, conduct disorder, and PTSD in adolescence
Emerging imaging data support links between childhood poverty and anatomical and functional changes in brain areas involved in the induction and regulation of emotion, like the amygdala. The amygdala is engaged in emotional learning, salience and threat detection
All scanning was performed using a Philips 3 T MRI scanner (Phillips Medical Systems, Andover, MA, USA) in the functional MRI laboratory at the VA Ann Arbor.
Given evidence for chronic stress mediating effects of poverty on brain function during emotion regulation in the same cohort (Kim et al., 2013), we also examined association between the measure of chronic stress and our neuroimaging variables.
Results suggest potentially longstanding negative effects of childhood poverty on adult social-emotional perception and signify the importance of prioritizing attempts toward elimination or reduction of this social problem as early in life as possible to prevent these long-lasting effects. Recall that our prospective findings are independent of concurrent adult income
maladaptive behaviors likely trigger further negative feedback from the environment and reinforce the biased social perception in these children. Finally, the current study underlines the importance of childhood family income in predicting neural outcomes in young adults during emotion responses
|