Childhood social inequalities influences neural processes in young adult caregiving

Abstract

Childhood poverty is associated with harsh parenting with a risk of transmission to the next generation. This prospective study examined the relations between childhood poverty and non-parent adults’ neural responses to infant cry sounds. While no main effects of poverty were revealed in contrasts of infant cry vs. acoustically matched white noise, a gender by childhood poverty interaction emerged. In females, childhood poverty was associated with increased neural activations in the posterior insula, striatum, calcarine sulcus, hippocampus and fusiform gyrus, while, in males, childhood poverty was associated with reduced levels of neural responses to infant cry in the same regions. Irrespective of gender, neural activation in these regions was associated with higher levels of annoyance with the cry sound and reduced desire to approach the crying infant. The findings suggest gender differences in neural and emotional responses to infant cry sounds among young adults growing up in poverty.

Sex-Specific Effects of Childhood Poverty on Neurocircuitry of Processing of Emotional Cues: A Neuroimaging Study

“…With regards to sex-specific effects of poverty, we reported that women with childhood poverty had a larger posterior insula response to infant cry than men with history of poverty [12]. There was no main effect of poverty or gender observed in this area, and the observed effect was an interaction of childhood poverty and sex.…”

“…One in four children in America are born to poverty [7], and identifying underlying mechanisms leading to long-term effects of poverty on physical and mental health is important in developing measures to prevent these adverse effects. There is accumulating evidence for anatomical and functional brain changes in adults as a result of childhood poverty, suggesting a neurobiological nature to the effects of childhood poverty [8,9,10,11,12,13]. Previous work has found this effect in brain regions involved in emotional response and emotion regulation.…”

“…Changes in amygdala volume, for example, have been repeatedly reported in adults with history of childhood poverty [8,9,10]. Amygdala hyperactivity in response to threat and fear-related social cues has been replicated in emotion provocation studies of adults with history of childhood poverty [11,12,13]. Reduced cortical thickness in anterior cingulate volume was also liked to history of childhood poverty [14,15].…”

“…Clearly, more work examining this question is needed, but the existing literature on such sex-specific effects of childhood poverty is very limited. In the current work, we examined data from three (previously reported) emotion provocation [13] and regulation tasks ([12,16] in a cohort of healthy adults with history of childhood poverty, to explore sex-specific effects of childhood poverty in emotional reactivity and regulation. In the context of the previous reports about the sex-specific effects of stress on emotion reactivity and regulation (more pronounced aberrations of emotion reactivity in females and emotion regulation in males), as well as the effects of poverty in the same areas, we expected to see more pronounced amygdala activation in emotion provocation tasks in women with a history of childhood poverty, and less activation in prefrontal cortical areas of DLPFC and VLPFC in emotion regulation tasks in men with childhood poverty.…”

Childhood poverty is associated with altered hippocampal function and visuospatial memory in adulthood

“…Fifty-four adults from age 20 to 27 ( M = 23.72, SD = 1.31) participated in this study within the context of an ongoing, larger longitudinal study examining associations between income and child development (Kim et al 2015; Javanbakht et al 2015; Evans 2003; Kim et al 2013; Sripada et al 2014; Evans et al 2016; Liberzon et al 2015). Eleven of the 54 participants did not have data on at least one of our measurements of interest (e.g.…”