Critical considerations about the use of poverty measures in the study of cognitive development

Socioeconomic determinants of overweight and obesity among Mexican children and adolescents: Systematic review and meta-analysis

Socioeconomic status (SES) has widely been studied as a potential risk factor for obesity among children and adolescents. Nevertheless, SES determinants are rarely contextualized within a country's situation. This work aimed to identify SES factors associated with childhood and adolescent obesity in Mexico. Eleven scientific databases were searched, and 54 studies met the inclusion criteria. When measuring SES, 56% of the studies measured wealth, 50% living environment (urban vs rural areas), 44% parental education, 30% ethnic origin, 24% income or monetary measurements, 20% parental occupation and 18% the type of school participants attended. We found that Mexican children and adolescents were significantly more likely to have either overweight or obesity if they had a higher wealth (estimated through household characteristics) (OR 1.43, 95% CI 1.19, 1.72), lived in urban areas (OR 1.41, 95% CI 1.20, 1.66), identified as non-Indigenous (OR 1.55, 95% CI 1.22, 1.96), had mothers with secondary school studies or higher (OR 1.44, 95% CI 1.14, 1.82), or mothers who were employed (OR 1.39, 95% CI 1.30, 1.48). Not all indicators of a higher SES (e.g., attending private school or not participating in a food provision program) were significantly associated with childhood overweight or obesity in Mexico. Furthermore, the evidence for other indicators, such as family structure, family size, household income, and monetary measures, remains uncertain. This work presents evidence of childhood obesity inequalities in Mexico.

Availability and access to Livelihood capital assets for development of sustainable Livelihood strategies of fishermen: A case study of Manchar Lake Pakistan

In developing nations with an abundance of natural water resources, fishing is a major source of income. When distributing resources between fisheries and other sectors, and preserving competitiveness in the fisheries industry, access to livelihood assets continues to be a key factor. However, vulnerability of livelihood assets and other economic and social variables have been severely affecting fishermen's livelihood. This article examines livelihood income vulnerability in the context of capital assets and the effects on local fishermen's livelihood and well-being. A survey sample size of 532 rural households based on a descriptive research design was used. Financial capital, human capital, social capital, and natural capital all made an enormous contribution to the earnings of fishermen and household heads in the Manchar Lake basin. The use of multiple regression analysis enabled new insights into how the livelihood assets characteristics affected their household income choices. The main objective of this investigation is to see whether access of livelihood capital assets affect local fishermen's livelihood income in the Manchar Lake basin. In the coastal belt of the Manchar Lake basin, resource acquisition plays a critical role in eradicating poverty. For the fishermen in the Manchar Lake basin, the current regime could further prioritize investing in fish trading infrastructure and improving essential facilities like social networks, education, skillsets, improved technology, and credit facilities in order to raise the livelihood income of fishermen and either reduce or alleviate poverty. These findings provide insight into fishermen's entry and exit for those who are planning livelihood shifts, and offer recommendations on how to overcome the constraints faced by the fisheries industry. Furthermore, insight into livelihood sustainability in order to improve the quality of life and income of fishermen domestically and nationally is also suggested.

Impact of an individualized and adaptive cognitive intervention on working memory, planning and fluid reasoning processing in preschoolers from poor homes

Contemporary evidence shows that different intervention approaches can be effective in improving executive cognitive performance in preschoolers from poor homes. However, several aspects about the role of individual and contextual differences in intervention effects remain to be elucidated. The present study aimed to explore the impact of a computerized executive cognitive intervention with lab-based tasks in preschoolers from Unsatisfied Basic Needs (UBN) homes. In the context of a randomized controlled design, different activities were administered to children according to their baseline performance in a variety of cognitive tasks tapping inhibitory control, working memory, and planning demands (i.e., high- and low-performance intervention and control groups). Results suggested that the impact of the intervention was shown preferentially by high-performers in Tower of London and K-Bit tasks, who increased their performances in the posttest assessment. This finding supports the importance of considering individual and contextual differences in the design of interventions aimed at changing the cognitive performance of children from poor homes.

Direct and indirect links between children's socio-economic status and education: pathways via mental health, attitude, and cognition

A child's socio-economic environment can profoundly affect their development. While existing literature focusses on simplified metrics and pair-wise relations between few variables, we aimed to capture complex interrelationships between several relevant domains using a broad assessment of 519 children aged 7-9 years. Our analyses comprised three multivariate techniques that complimented each other, and worked at different levels of granularity. First, an exploratory factor analysis (principal component analysis followed by varimax rotation) revealed that our sample varied along continuous dimensions of cognition, attitude and mental health (from parallel analysis); with potentially emerging dimensions speed and socio-economic status (passed Kaiser's criterion). Second, k-means cluster analysis showed that children did not group into discrete phenotypes. Third, a network analysis on the basis of bootstrapped partial correlations (confirmed by both cross-validated LASSO and multiple comparisons correction of binarised connection probabilities) uncovered how our developmental measures interconnected: educational outcomes (reading and maths fluency) were directly related to cognition (short-term memory, number sense, processing speed, inhibition). By contrast, mental health (anxiety and depression symptoms) and attitudes (conscientiousness, grit, growth mindset) showed indirect relationships with educational outcomes via cognition. Finally, socio-economic factors (neighbourhood deprivation, family affluence) related directly to educational outcomes, cognition, mental health, and even grit. In sum, cognition is a central cog through which mental health and attitude relate to educational outcomes. However, through direct relations with all components of developmental outcomes, socio-economic status acts as a great 'unequaliser'.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-021-02232-2.

Individual and socioenvironmental differences in autobiographical emotional appraisal of preschoolers

Emotions are essential processes for integrating events into autobiographical memory. Different children react differently to the same event. The process through which these different responses are generated from subjective evaluations of an event is called emotional appraisal. The main purpose of this study was to analyze the variations in the emotional appraisal of autobiographical events of 4- and 5-year-old children from homes with different socioenvironmental conditions. We compared preschoolers' emotional appraisal responses with those of their families. The emotional accuracy of the preschoolers was found to differ according to the different socioenvironmental conditions of their homes. Greater appraisal accuracy was observed in the favorable condition, and it was greater for emotional events than for neutral events. Appraisal accuracy also differed with age, with 5-year-olds showing greater appraisal accuracy than 4-year-olds. Therefore, the emotional appraisal of these events may also be affected by age and valence when attributing emotions to personal experiences.

Childhood Socioeconomic Status and Later Life Cognition: Evidence From the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study

Objectives:This study examined childhood socioeconomic status (SES) as a predictor of later life cognition and the extent to which midlife SES accounts for associations. Methods: Data came from 5,074 participants in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. Measures from adolescence included parents' educational attainment, father's occupational status, and household income. Memory and language/executive function were assessed at ages 65 and 72 years. Results: Global childhood SES was a stronger predictor of baseline levels of language/executive function than baseline memory. Associations involving parents' education were reduced in size and by statistical significance when accounting for participants' midlife SES, whereas associations involving parental income and occupational status became statistically nonsignificant. We found no associations between childhood SES and change in cognition. Discussion: Findings contribute to growing evidence that socioeconomic differences in childhood have potential consequences for later life cognition, particularly in terms of the disparate levels of cognition with which people enter later life.

Risks for Child Cognitive Development in Rural Contexts

While poverty all over the world is more typical and extreme in rural contexts, interventions to improve cognition in low socioeconomic status (SES) children are for the most part based on studies conducted in urban populations. This paper investigate how poverty and rural or urban settings affect child cognitive performance. Executive functions and non-verbal intelligence performance, as well as individual and environmental information was obtained from 131 5-year-old children. For the same level of SES, children in rural settings performed consistently worse than children in urban settings. These differences could be accounted mostly by the months of past preschool attendance and the father's completed level of education. These results should inform policies and programs for children living in rural poverty worldwide, and specially in Latin America.

Neuroscience of Childhood Poverty: Evidence of Impacts and Mechanisms as Vehicles of Dialog With Ethics

Several studies have identified associations between poverty and development of self-regulation during childhood, which is broadly defined as those skills involved in cognitive, emotional, and stress self-regulation. These skills are influenced by different individual and contextual factors at multiple levels of analysis (i.e., individual, family, social, and cultural). Available evidence suggests that the influences of those biological, psychosocial, and sociocultural factors on emotional and cognitive development can vary according to the type, number, accumulation of risks, and co-occurrence of adverse circumstances that are related to poverty, the time in which these factors exert their influences, and the individual susceptibility to them. Complementary, during the past three decades, several experimental interventions that were aimed at optimizing development of self-regulation of children who live in poverty have been designed, implemented, and evaluated. Their results suggest that it is possible to optimize different aspects of cognitive performance and that it would be possible to transfer some aspects of these gains to other cognitive domains and academic achievement. We suggest that it is an important task for ethics, notably but not exclusively neuroethics, to engage in this interdisciplinary research domain to contribute analyses of key concepts, arguments, and interpretations. The specific evidence that neuroscience brings to the analyses of poverty and its implications needs to be spelled out in detail and clarified conceptually, notably in terms of causes of and attitudes toward poverty, implications of poverty for brain development, and for the possibilities to reduce and reverse these effects.

The application of neuroimaging to social inequity and language disparity: A cautionary examination

In the nascent field of the cognitive neuroscience of socioeconomic status (SES), researchers are using neuroimaging to examine how growing up in poverty affects children's neurocognitive development, particularly their language abilities. In this review we highlight difficulties inherent in the frequent use of reverse inference to interpret SES-related abnormalities in brain regions that support language. While there is growing evidence suggesting that SES moderates children's developing brain structure and function, no studies to date have elucidated explicitly how these neural findings are related to variations in children's language abilities, or precisely what it is about SES that underlies or contributes to these differences. This issue is complicated by the fact that SES is confounded with such linguistic factors as cultural language use, first language, and bilingualism. Thus, SES-associated differences in brain regions that support language may not necessarily indicate differences in neurocognitive abilities. In this review we consider the multidimensionality of SES, discuss studies that have found SES-related differences in structure and function in brain regions that support language, and suggest future directions for studies in the area of cognitive neuroscience of SES that are less reliant on reverse inference.