Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)

Poverty, not trauma, affects cognitive function in refugee youth: study (2019)
news.yale.edu

https://www.keranews.org/post/kids-living-poverty-living-chr...

Based on the abstract in the OP, the study seems to focus on acute war-related trauma. Poverty can be a kind of slow-rolling, unending trauma of its own. Not criticizing the article/headline, just a cautionary note to avoid extrapolating too much from this.

https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdev.1...

If I'm reading the results table in the linked paper correctly, it seems that household wealth was only a significant predictor of working memory in the combined group and the refugee group but not in the non-refugee group, indicating a possible interaction that it is trauma that increases the susceptibility to poverty.

Also, one of the strongest predictions of working memory in all groups was gender, which may be an indicator that confounding factors haven't been broken down. For example, with gender, one would ask the question are males really that much better at working memory, or is there a treatment of male children that would result in the noted difference. In the same way, poverty may result in different treatment during a refugee event or similar mass trauma that may have a larger impact on cognitive function. A simple hypothesis would be that wealthier refugees have better access to food which means that there is less cognitive decline associated with poor nutrition during childhood brain development that occurs during a war time event.

1. The impoverished are usually the ones who end up as refugees in the first place. 2. Poverty is highly generational. 3. The impoverished are generally lower IQ/cognitive/resourceful/creative/motivated/entrepreneurial (genetically pre-dispositioning wise) 4. Impoverished aren't exposed to the things that successful people were as children. Not just educational and culturally, but also habitually. Learning good skills and habits such as being organized, working smarter, not harder, finding solutions to propel ones self upward economically ETC. People pass these things down to their children. 5. Other naturally born "privileges" such as being taller, stronger, more attractive are genetic and contribute to being impoverished, leading to being a refugee.

There, save the study...