Feb 3: A long-term analysis of hundreds of adolescent brains suggests that the socioeconomic status (SES) of a child’s family may play a role in the development of key brain areas responsible for learning, language, and emotional development.

To study the effects between a parent’s income and education levels and their child’s cognitive development, researchers from the National Institute of Mental Health scanned the brains of more than 600 individuals over the course of their lives between the ages of five and 25. They then compared these neuroimages against data on their parents’ education and occupation, as well as each participants’ IQ.  

When it comes to the relationship between brain anatomy and SES, little changes from childhood to early adulthood. This led researchers to believe that preschool life is a pivotal time in which associations between socioeconomic status and brain organization first begins to develop. SES was shown to be positively associated with total grey matter volume and less consistently with white matter volume. It was also associated with volume levels in the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain associated with personality development, and the emotion-regulating hippocampus.

“We found positive associations between SES and total volumes of the brain, cortical sheet, and four separate subcortical structures,” wrote the authors in the Journal of Neuroscience, adding that the areas of the brain responsible for emotional development, learning, and language skills were more complex in people whose parents were more educated and worked in professional careers.

 
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