Social Position and Stress

At Loyola University Chicago, Professor Daniel Hackman from University of Pennsylvania came to talk about some of the research he has been doing. His research was about how a youth's, or child's, socioeconomic position can predict how healthy they will be in the future. Dr. Hackman explains that socioeconomic position, or SEP, is made up of different kinds of levels of different subject matters. It takes into account the family income, type of neighborhood, access to quality education, the amount of family interaction, and the types of qualities the child has.

For example, Hackman states that if a child has access to good social and material resources, it can lead to good life opportunities. However, he states that if the environment is subpar, the child's health will be lower due to a lower SEP. He also states that socioeconomic position and health are linked by two things: executive function and stress reactivity. Executive functions are termed as "the management of cognitive processes, including working memory, reasoning, task flexibility, problem solving, and planning and executing tasks." Stress reactivity is defined as how well a child reacts to outside environments. Determinants of executive functions are neurocognitive and determinants of stress reactivity are neuroendocrine.

He goes on to explain how there are three different models of SEP, but the outcome is similar for all of them. The three models are the Childhood-limited, Emergent-Cumulative, and the Child-Adolescent. The three models take into account different variables so the rate of change of the graph and the starting point for the high and low SEP children are different, but the outcome is usually similar for all three. The outcome is that kids with a lower SEP tend to grow up having higher levels of stress than their higher SEP counterparts. Kids with a lower SEP had higher levels of cortisol. The neurocognitive response that shows this is that the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) makes cortisol because its a dynamic response to threat and just a common stress response as well.

An article that can relate to this study from The New York Times, talks about how social status can affect your health. How Social Status Affects Your Health, by Christopher Von Ruden, attempted, and succeeded, in finding a way how status affects your health. The article states that you have to isolate status from material wealth, and to do that they observed and studied the Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of Amazonian Bolivia. Although they have no organized hierarchy, there were individuals that seemed to be more influential in village meetings. Men with lower influence had higher levels of cortisol, while those who were influential had less levels. It even states that children from this society are being studied to see if those that come from the males who have influence end up having lower levels of stress in the future. Less influential males had a higher risk of obtaining a respiratory infection, which was the most common illness from the tribe. Researchers believed that the less influential males had more cortisol because of other factors as well. They think that influential males had a greater sense of control. They had more allies and food-production partners, so they always had someone when they needed help or could obtain food when it was short.

WORKS CITED

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_functions

https://luc.app.box.com/neuroscienceseminar/1/5608531521/45509095665/1

http://www.stress.org/are-you-a-stress-addict/