STRESS, POVERTY, AND ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE
(Posted 2009-12-15 17:21:59 by Ray Lopez)

In the latest issue of _Psychological Science_, Chen, Cohen, and Miller
report that kids from low socioeconomic status (SES) families show elevated
levels of the stress hormone cortisol.  From their abstract:

_Individuals with a low socioeconomic status (SES) are at increased risk
for mental and physical health problems, and the relationship may be
mediated by the stress hormone cortisol. Over a 2-year period, children
from low-SES backgrounds had higher levels of cortisol than did those from
higher-SES backgrounds. Children from lower-SES backgrounds reported
greater perceptions of threat and more family chaos, both of which may
raise cortisol levels._

This is a fascinating finding, and something I was expecting.  We know that
chronic exposure to stress hormones like cortisol can cause damage to key
areas of the brain associated with learning and memory, most notably the
hippocampus.  We also know that children who come from low SES families
tend to do poorly with regard to academic performance. 

Given all of this, the next set of studies to focus on would be to examine
the effects of _current_ stressors on academic performance, as well as the
role of _chronic_ stressors.  I would imagine one study where you had at
least four groups:

Group 1:  Low current stress and low chronic stress history
Group 2:  Low current stress and high chronic stress history
Group 3:  High current stress and low chronic stress history
Group 4:  High current stress and high chronic stress history

The obvious hypothesis to test would be that Group 1 would perform best
academically, and Group 4 would perform the worst.  But the real
interesting results would be in comparing and contrasting Groups 2 and 3. 
At the very least, I would think that these groups might perform equally
bad academically, and fall somewhere between the performance measures of
Groups 1 and 4.  But it is also possible that Group 2 may have enough
cortisol-related brain anomalies that their performance would be worse than
that of Group 3.  

At any rate, if the results of such a study were able to demonstrate clear
effects of current stress and chronic stress, the next step would be to see
if we could relate the detrimental effects of chronic stress to specific
brain damage.  Behaviorally, we could test hippocampal functioning with
spatial navigation tasks.  It might also be possible to use functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study hippocampal activity in
non-stressed and chronically stressed students.  There are also a number of
pharmacological manipulations that involve the enhancement or blockage of
certain hippocampus-related functions.  If chronically stressed and
non-stressed students responded differently to these pharmacological
manipulations, that would provide further evidence of hippocampal damage
due to chronic stress.

Once a relationship is established, of course, we'd need to see if we could
start coming up with interventions to help the children exposed to chronic
stressors.  At a minimum, I would think that families would need to be
educated on what constitutes "stress", and how stress can affect the lives
of their kids.  


--------

There are no comments on this post.


To submit a comment on this post, email rl@well.com or visit us on the web
[ http://ratthing.com ].
.