Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

https://news.yale.edu/2019/10/24/study-poverty-not-trauma-affects-cognitive-function-refugee-youth

by ignored • 6 years ago

250 63 6 years ago

news.yale.edu

modwest• 6 years ago

Trauma is poverty's handmaiden.

https://www.keranews.org/post/kids-living-poverty-living-chr...

Based on the abstract in the OP, the study seems to focus on acute war-related trauma. Poverty can be a kind of slow-rolling, unending trauma of its own. Not criticizing the article/headline, just a cautionary note to avoid extrapolating too much from this.

ngold• 6 years ago

Imagine being so poor you can't concentrate on what tomorrow is. That is what being poor does to you. It robs you of thinking.

cbhl• 6 years ago

I remember in high school, some of my peers participated in the 30 Hour Famine, to help get a better understanding of this.

l33tbro• 6 years ago

Neglect is a truly wretched cycle. When a child's parents cannot afford and value things like basic dietary nutrition and care, it creates cerebral abnormalities [1] due to lack of neuro-cognitive development.

It's then up to half-hearted social/governmental intervention to prevent it from becoming the same for the child's eventual offspring - a hail Mary that rarely lands with some individuals getting on a better path.

[1] https://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/newsletter/2012/07...

threatofrain• 6 years ago

Or it's too hot or cold because you don't have temperature controls, so you could lose a few months of studious productivity per year.

Ghjklov4• 6 years ago

This is hugely underrated. My room's poorly insulated so when it's hot, it's like a microwave in here and when it's cold, I can feel it to my bone (I remember almost crying some nights in 2018 because it was so cold). There's no central heating and the AC is outside my room and doesn't reach my room at all. When it was cold, I would stay in bed longer. Then I wouldn't be able to spend longer than 5-10 minutes sitting at my desk before going back to under a blanket. When it's hot, I would feel so incredibly lazy and drained of energy and ultimately do nothing except lie on the floor hoping for better days. Now that I have a fan and a small space heater, things are a lot better.

mtm7• 6 years ago

This becomes even worse if your food supply is limited. Your body produces less heat if you’re not eating enough calories, which can make you feel cold even in a normal temperature.

65103• 6 years ago

Imagine having such a shit life that you best move on without looking back. The brain will adapt and stop feeding you that garbage that is your memories. Everything you wanted to be doing hurts when you see others do it. I don't know how scientific it is but I think woman want to have babies. Eventually just seeing one makes a painful experience. If only you could suppress association, turns out you can.

Ghjklov4• 6 years ago

I've been there. Once you start thinking to yourself that there is no long term future ahead of you, the kind of choices you make becomes almost like a sick joke. Buy some fruit and vegetables to eat so that you can feel nourished and live a long life, or eat some feel good salty sugar loaded fast food because you have no fucking future anyway? Study and gain employable skills or play video games right now because you're going to die homeless next month after you can no longer pay rent due to a pandemic?

mrscottson• 6 years ago

I know you are using your experience as an example...but I think with real poverty, you probably wouldnt know much about nutrition and neither would your parents...with enough caloric difficiency and without proper nutrition, much of the decision making/studying/long-term-planning abilities degrade quite rapidly.

jlawson2• 6 years ago

you're going to die homeless next month

Help me understand how someone could believe something along these lines for more-or-less their entire life. The fact is that poor people live long lives of many decades; they observe others around them just like them living many decades. There's nothing close to a rational reason to discount the future that hard.

How does one end up believing that every month is their last when it clearly isn't? I know people who are persistently poor act like they believe it, but I didn't think they literally consciously thought it was true.

Der_Einzige• 6 years ago

Isn't there some joke about being "too poor to pay attention"? Looks like it ended up being true.

pmiller2• 6 years ago

In other words, the submission title is misleading: the effects of poverty are type of trauma. We're not talking about "too poor to afford the latest game console" here; we're talking about people who have trouble with things at the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs [0].

---

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

TomMckenny• 6 years ago

Poverty is also thought to have caused the diffidence in performance in the marshmallow test[1]. Poor kids learn to take advantage of the moment and distrust the future. And poor kids tend to be lower earners in later life than wealthier kids due to advantage differences[2][3]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...

[2]https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/marshmall...

[3]https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761876166...

SkyBelow2• 6 years ago

Paper:

https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdev.1...

If I'm reading the results table in the linked paper correctly, it seems that household wealth was only a significant predictor of working memory in the combined group and the refugee group but not in the non-refugee group, indicating a possible interaction that it is trauma that increases the susceptibility to poverty.

Also, one of the strongest predictions of working memory in all groups was gender, which may be an indicator that confounding factors haven't been broken down. For example, with gender, one would ask the question are males really that much better at working memory, or is there a treatment of male children that would result in the noted difference. In the same way, poverty may result in different treatment during a refugee event or similar mass trauma that may have a larger impact on cognitive function. A simple hypothesis would be that wealthier refugees have better access to food which means that there is less cognitive decline associated with poor nutrition during childhood brain development that occurs during a war time event.

downerending3• 6 years ago

Is there other research indicating that males have better working memory than females?

SkyBelow2• 6 years ago

I can't speak to specifically working memory, but there is a wide variety of research on sexual dimorphism in humans, including in cognitive function. I know there was some research showing males having better spatial memory than females.

But all of this is caught up in a large nature vs nurture (vs both) question. Is it genetics that cause this? Is it the environment (social pressure/influence) that causes this? Is it a combination of genetics and environment that causes this?

The same sort of complexity would exist in any real life test like this, because this isn't a laboratory where you can make sure everything but a single independent variable is the same, modify that independent variable, and then measure the influence on the dependent variable.

xyzzyz4• 6 years ago

Also, one of the strongest predictions of working memory in all groups was gender, which may be an indicator that confounding factors haven't been broken down.

Only if you erroneously assume that the sex cannot be predictive of differences in working memory. We know it's not the case: there are sex differences in average scores in subtests (or in group factors). However, most results point in the direction of female advantage in short term memory. Jensen's 1998 book for example quotes Cohen's d between -0.2 and -0.3, favoring females.

jacobolus2• 6 years ago

Only if you erroneously assume ...

The previous commenter made some qualified questioning speculation. Leaping to conclusions about what his or her unstated assumptions must have been and then calling them “erroneous” seems a bit hostile.

* * *

How does one tease out the difference between inherent biological differences vs. differences caused by a lifetime spent in the differing social/cultural environment facing boys vs. girls?

How robust are working memory differences between sexes across time, across different countries, across different subcultural groups, etc.?

364738299• 6 years ago

Is the correct word in this context actually gender or would it be sex? Given the context, the difference seems like it would be relevant.

Hermel• 6 years ago

But trauma is what increases their likelihood of committing crimes later in life, according to an excellent paper in AER (?) I recently read but can’t look up right now. :)

65103• 6 years ago

Yes! And it also makes for the kindest most generous people.

BurningFrog2• 6 years ago

Then again low cognitive function leads to poverty.

Do they try to disambiguate that at all?

claudiawerner2• 6 years ago

It would be surprising (to me, anyway) if the case is that the low cognitive function of war-affected Syrian youths is the cause of their own poverty.

dcolkitt• 6 years ago

Intelligence is highly hereditable[1]. Intelligence is also highly correlated with earning potential, in middle-income Western Asian nations[2]. (It's correlated everywhere, but I cite that specifically because the study in the link was carried out in Jordan.)

Therefore it's highly likely that high IQ refugee children, have high IQ refugee parents, who are earning a higher household income after they resettle into their new country. For example a doctor from Syria could likely retrain as a doctor in Jordan. Statistically speaking his kids are probably more intelligent than someone who was a janitor in Syria.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#cite_note-6 [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

BurningFrog2• 6 years ago

I admit I didn't read the article, and the war angle does change a lot.

Still, unless you have zero influence on your circumstances, I would always expect the clever to end up in better situations than the less gifted.

johnnyAghands• 6 years ago

I hope data like this can help society in ridding this disease -- poverty is a disease. Looking at the results and anecdotal evidence it feels like this is obvious.. but the fact of the matter is unless you've been through it, it's very unlikely you can truly appreciate the magnitude of the results.

I hope studies like these and the changing demographics of power (with respect to age and race) will start focusing on this complicated problem.

What still seems unknown to me is what specific environmental traits of "poverty" have the strongest negative impact? I mean, we've all heard of "rags to riches" stories --- how do they differ?

nradov• 6 years ago

Eliminating extreme poverty would be nice, but unfortunately overreactions to COVID-19 in some countries are currently driving the world economy into a depression and increasing poverty. While the pandemic is clearly a terrible public health crisis, poverty also kills people. It just takes longer than the virus. Expect to see higher rates of suicide, substance abuse, and chronic disease in the next few years.

jpindar• 6 years ago

There's going to be a lot of homeless people as soon as the various state's eviction bans are lifted.

incompatible• 6 years ago

I suppose that a lot of economic activity isn't really essential and can be shut down without problems. E.g., cruise ships no longer sailing, or making gold watches. Lack of these kinds of goods and services is unlikely to do any damage to cognitive functions.

It would be interesting to refine "poverty" to identify exactly what the minimum healthy level of "consumption" for a typical human is going to be. It doesn't seem to me that it's very high: food, clean water, safe housing, a bit of electricity for cooking etc., and ideally connectivity to the wider world, e.g., a computer with an internet connection. I suppose you could say that that's actually quite a lot, and brings you up to Western industrial society standards. But I suspect that with an industrial economy, all of that can be provided to the entire population with relatively little effort, e.g., if people were working a couple of days a week.

Any medical requirements would be on top of that of course.

65103• 6 years ago

Its being surrounded by other poor people who produce fresh drama every day. Horrific drama.

aabeshou3• 6 years ago

I think that "disease" is a misleading term, because it makes it sound like an act of god or nature. I'd say it's more like a moral evil. Because there are people in power who have the ability to eradicate this, simply by paying their workers more, or allocating government money to public services rather than to tax cuts for the rich, but they don't. They push austerity, they exploit greedily, and those are deliberate human acts of selfish evil.

I'd say that the global implicit and explicit ideology of "greed is good" and "might makes right", as well as the tendency of our systems towards nearly boundless concentration of resources and power in the hands of few, is the real disease.

refurb2• 6 years ago

You think it's possible to "eradicate" poverty?

Poverty is relative, not absolute. Even if you gave everyone in the country $50,000 in UBI, you'd still have poverty, because you'd have people at the bottom of the income range who can't afford what others can.

The only way to possibly eradicate it is if you made everyone equal - same take home pay, no inheritance, no monetary gifts, etc. Everyone has the same net income at the end of the day.

twomoretime• 6 years ago

This research was funded by Elrha’s Research for Health in Humanitarian Crises (R2HC) Programme (https://www.elrha.org/project/yale-psychosocial-call2/), which aims to improve health outcomes by strengthening the evidence base for public health interventions in humanitarian crises

I know that the intentions appear to be benevolent but I'd just point out that this isn't really an unbiased source, so it may be prudent to take their results with a grain.

motohagiography• 6 years ago

The problems of poverty in this abstract appear to be framed in terms of the authors' perceived solutions.

What if we looked at the link between self perceptions of victimisation, life outcomes, and symptoms of poverty? I'd posit it's the necessary condition. The overlap in solutions, particularly education, financial independence, social equity are all there, but the difference would be chicken vs. egg, where authors like this would say the victimized identity is caused by the lack of these solutions, whereas many working people would say that inculcating and encouraging the beliefs that support that identity cause and reinforce the barriers to those solutions. The argument that individuals experience poverty for lack of a bureaucracy that is concerned with it should seem a bit specious.

Or as W.H. Auden put it, "The friends of the born nurse Are always getting worse."

adelHBN• 6 years ago

A point that merits consideration is whether or not refugee camps perpetuate poverty. For example, did wealthy Syrians end up in refugee camps? And if so, have they remained there? The same question can be asked about Palestinians decades ago. The point is this, as someone who immigrated to the U.S. from the Middle East as a minor, I think while the squalid conditions of refugee camps certainly affect cognitive function in refugee youth, the refugee camp youth probably came from (or were born into) lower socioeconomic strata of their home country. Does my question make sense? Is my assumption correct?

hyperpallium• 6 years ago

I thought working memory (WM) was mostly number of items recalled, and for most people it's 5-7. The actual test they used would benefit from exposure to video games (poverty would affect access):

a screen that displayed one, two, or three dots for 2 s and instructed to remember where the dot(s) were located (Figure S2b). The screen then went blank (for 0.1 or 3 s), after which it changed color indicating that participants should touch the screen precisely where the dot(s) had appeared.

Not a serious criticism, more about the nature of WM and how to measure it.

pgt• 6 years ago

Poverty = trauma?

Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

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