The social emotional developmental and cognitive neuroscience of socioeconomic gradients: laboratory, population, cross-cultural and community developmental approaches

The study of the socioeconomic neurogradients—i.e., neural differences corresponding to variations in socioeconomic status (SES)—is a neonate area of transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research within neuroscience; this Research Topic portrays the current status in addressing social inequities and life-span brain development. To start off, papers focus on development areas that are commonly known to be influenced by SES, including attention, language and literacy, reading, and numeracy. The life-course maturation and development of brain activation associated with these skills is reviewed by Lipina and Posner (2012), with emphasis on the early years. Although neuroplasticity is present throughout the lifespan, critical periods justify the importance of early intervention. Neuroscientists have the responsibility to recognize the many facets of poverty and to adopt an interdisciplinary perspective when using research to inform public policy and interventions. Furthermore, universal early intervention is recommended—not just targeting lower-SES children. D’Angiulli et al. (2012a) examine the emotional/motivational states associated with preadolescent children’s performance on an auditory selective attention task, which is then correlated with event-related potentials (ERPs) and electroencephalographic (EEG) techniques to identify brain activity associated with levels of SES. Salivary cortisol and affective self-reports were collected throughout the school day. Although lowerand higher-SES children showed similar behavioral performance, the observed patterns of EEG and ERP differences suggest that children from lower-SES may extend more effortful control to perform similarly to their higher-SES counterparts. Lower-SES preadolescents show a genuine (i.e., unconfounded by “non-cognitive” states) information-processing preference to attend equally relevant and irrelevant environmental cues. To date, neuroscientific research has seldom addressed the relations between SES, cultural factors, and immigrant/native background on children’s moral development—the topics investigated by Caravita et al. (2012). These authors find that children from middle-low SES families perceive transgressions of socio-conventional dilemmas (i.e., social order) more strictly than their middle and middle-high SES counterparts, suggesting that environmental circumstances may lead to more rigid guidelines regarding social conventions of morality, because the repercussions may be viewed as more severe (i.e., social exclusion). Incorporating these findings into neuroscientific research would allow better understanding of which brain processes are implicated in moral decision making. In a related domain, Gavrilov et al. (2012) examine young children’s social development focusing on the role of joint attention. When offered a toy to engage in play with an adult, children (especially girls) from highly traditional and religious families engage in joint attention more frequently than children from families who are less religious and embrace western standards. In families where gender stereotypes are more apparent, girls appear to absorb these roles and are more in tune with socio-cultural expectations. This may be associated with the earlier maturation of the ventral prefrontal cortex among girls. Joint attention might thus be a mechanism that allows children to appropriate cultural values into behavior with the moderating influence of various bioecological levels. Examining the concept of ecology further, Hackman et al. (2012) explore whether neighborhood disadvantage influences stress reactivity in adolescents as moderated by gender. African-American adolescents participated in a stress-inducing task as researchers monitored stress reactivity and recovery reflected in salivary cortisol levels. Neighborhood disadvantage was inversely correlated with parental education level. Furthermore, concentrated neighborhood disadvantage was correlated with adolescent stress reactivity and recovery. Particularly, boys demonstrated higher cortisol reactivity and steeper recovery. These findings support firstly the importance of discerning gender effects in adolescent neurogradients and, secondly, considering neighborhood disadvantage as important variable for intervention. The implications of SES research within neuroscience are reviewed by D’Angiulli et al. (2012b), with focus on poverty. Unidimensional definitions of poverty may fail to capture the