Can poverty get under your skin? Basal cortisol levels and cognitive function in childrenfrom low and high socioeconomic status
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is well known that individuals from more advantaged social classes enjoy better mental and physical health than do individuals within lower classes. Various mechanisms have been evoked to explain the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and health. One mechanism that has received particular attention in recent years is stress. It has been shown that individuals lower in SES report greater exposure to stressful life events and a greater impact of these events on their life than individuals higher in SES. In order to measure whether the development of the relationship between SES and mental health is sustained by exposure to high levels of glucocorticoids, we measured morning salivary cortisol levels as well as cognitive function (memory, attention, and language) in 307 children (from 6 to 16 years of age) from low versus high SES in the Montreal area in Canada. The results revealed that low SES children from 6 to 10 years old present significantly higher salivary cortisol levels when compared to children from high SES. This difference disappears at the time of school transition, and no SES differences are observed in salivary cortisol levels during high school. However, children from low and high SES do not differ with regard to memory or to attentional and linguistic functions. Also, mothers of low SES children reported higher feelings of depression and more unhealthy behaviors, while mothers of high SES children reported higher stress related to work or family transitions. Altogether, these results show that low SES in young children is related to increased cortisol secretion, although the impact of SES on cortisol secretion is absent after transition to high school. These data are interpreted within the context of the equalization process of class patterning. Four social explanatory factors are suggested to explain the disappearance of SES differences in basal cortisol levels after school transition, taking into account the influence of family environment on the child's secretion of stress hormones.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".