Does Early-Life Exposure to Stress Shape or Impair Cognition?

Abstract

A predominant view in psychology is that early psychosocial adversity (e.g., abuse) impairs cognition, because children from stressful backgrounds (e.g., violent households) score lower on standard tests of intelligence, language, memory, inhibition, and other abilities. However, recent studies indicate that these people may exhibit improved detection, learning, and memory on tasks involving stimuli that are ecologically relevant to them (e.g., dangers), compared with safely nurtured peers. These findings contradict the view that cognition of stressed people is generally impaired; they suggest, rather, that these people’s minds are developmentally specialized toward local environmental conditions. Here, we review recent research supporting this hypothesis. In addition, we propose that novel studies should examine whether stressed children show not only improved detection but also improved memory and reasoning on tasks involving stimuli that are ecologically relevant to them. Finally, we discuss clinical implications of switching from conceptualizing stressed minds as “adapted” rather than “impaired.”

Child Maltreatment, Trauma‐Related Psychopathology, and Eyewitness Memory in Children and Adolescents

“…Based on these findings, researchers suggest that early exposure to threat, humiliation, and/or violence (such as childhood maltreatment) is related to the creation of specialized mental systems or processes that promote attention to and memory for information relevant to children's unique, and largely negative, environmental conditions. In other words, these children may have adapted to their stressful situations by developing improved detection, understanding, and memory of information relevant to distress and danger (Alexander et al, 2005;Frankenhuis & de Weerth, 2013; but see Young & Widom, 2014). Overall, research supports the theory that a history of maltreatment may result in heightened attention to and understanding of negative emotional stimuli (e.g., anger-related material).…”

Does Exposure to Hostile Environments Predict Enhanced Emotion Detection?

“…In such environments, mental systems might develop a focus on reducing the probability of harm (Belsky, 2008;Callaghan & Tottenham, 2016;Ellis & Del Giudice, 2014;Frankenhuis, Panchanathan, & Nettle, 2016;Taylor, 2006;Varnum & Kitayama, 2017). Reducing harm can be accomplished by enhancing cognitive abilities for detecting threats accurately (Frankenhuis & de Weerth, 2013), or by lowering the threshold for detection of threat, at the expense of increasing the number of 'false alarms' (Haselton et al, 2009;Haselton & Buss, 2000;Nettle & Haselton, 2006). Such ' erring on the side of caution' might be adaptive when the costs of 'false alarms' are lower than the costs of 'misses,' depending also on the base rate of threats (Bateson, Brilot, & Nettle, 2011;McKay & Efferson, 2010).…”

“…Some studies show that growing up in hostile social conditions predicts enhanced accuracy in threat detection (reviewed in Ellis, Bianchi, Griskevicius, & Frankenhuis, 2017;Frankenhuis & de Weerth, 2013). Others report bias towards heightened sensitivity to threat (reviewed in Crick & Dodge, 1994;De Castro & van Dijk, 2017).…”

“…At a group level, we expected the community sample to be more accurate at detecting an angry face in a crowd than the student sample (see Ellis et al, 2017;Frankenhuis & de Weerth, 2013). At an individual level, we expected people who had experienced more violence to be more accurate at detecting an angry face than people who had experienced less violence.…”

Testing location memory for threatening and nonthreatening stimuli : implications for evolutionary psychological theorizing.

“…Recent studies show that individuals with a history of enduring abuse are better than safely nurtured individuals on detection and memory tasks involving dangerous stimuli (Frankenhuis & de Weerth, 2013). Frankenhuis and de Weerth argue that this reflects the fact that our cognitive systems are plastic, and develop to best process information that is most relevant to each individual.…”