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

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

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be surprising (to me, anyway) if the case is that the low cognitive function of war-affected Syrian youths is the cause of their own poverty.

Intelligence is highly hereditable[1]. Intelligence is also highly correlated with earning potential, in middle-income Western Asian nations[2]. (It's correlated everywhere, but I cite that specifically because the study in the link was carried out in Jordan.) Therefore it's highly likely that high IQ refugee children, have high IQ refugee parents, who are earning a higher household income after they resettle into th…

Interesting. A possibly relevant point from the Wikipedia article:

>A common error is to assume that a heritability figure is necessarily unchangeable. The value of heritability can change if the impact of environment (or of genes) in the population is substantially altered.[15] If the environmental variation encountered by different individuals increases, then the heritability figure would decrease. On the other hand, if everyone had the same environment, then heritability would be 100%. The population in developing nations often has more diverse environments than in developed nations.[citation needed] This would mean that heritability figures would be lower in developing nations. Another example is phenylketonuria which previously caused mental retardation for everyone who had this genetic disorder and thus had a heritability of 100%. Today, this can be prevented by following a modified diet, resulting in a lowered heritability.

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

#32
post #29
post #4

Imagine being so poor you can't concentrate on what tomorrow is. That is what being poor does to you. It robs you of thinking.

I've been there. Once you start thinking to yourself that there is no long term future ahead of you, the kind of choices you make becomes almost like a sick joke. Buy some fruit and vegetables to eat so that you can feel nourished and live a long life, or eat some feel good salty sugar loaded fast food because you have no fucking future anyway? Study and gain employable skills or play video games right now because yo…

I know you are using your experience as an example...but I think with real poverty, you probably wouldnt know much about nutrition and neither would your parents...with enough caloric difficiency and without proper nutrition, much of the decision making/studying/long-term-planning abilities degrade quite rapidly.

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

#33
The problems of poverty in this abstract appear to be framed in terms of the authors' perceived solutions.

What if we looked at the link between self perceptions of victimisation, life outcomes, and symptoms of poverty? I'd posit it's the necessary condition. The overlap in solutions, particularly education, financial independence, social equity are all there, but the difference would be chicken vs. egg, where authors like this would say the victimized identity is caused by the lack of these solutions, whereas many working people would say that inculcating and encouraging the beliefs that support that identity cause and reinforce the barriers to those solutions. The argument that individuals experience poverty for lack of a bureaucracy that is concerned with it should seem a bit specious.

Or as W.H. Auden put it, "The friends of the born nurse Are always getting worse."

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

#34
post #15
post #5

Paper: 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…

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. Only if you erroneously assume that the sex cannot be predictive of differences in working memory. We know it's not the case: there are sex differences in average scores in subtests (or in group factors). However, most results point in the direction of female…

> Only if you erroneously assume ...

The previous commenter made some qualified questioning speculation. Leaping to conclusions about what his or her unstated assumptions must have been and then calling them “erroneous” seems a bit hostile.

* * *

How does one tease out the difference between inherent biological differences vs. differences caused by a lifetime spent in the differing social/cultural environment facing boys vs. girls?

How robust are working memory differences between sexes across time, across different countries, across different subcultural groups, etc.?

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

#35
post #4

Imagine being so poor you can't concentrate on what tomorrow is. That is what being poor does to you. It robs you of thinking.

Isn't there some joke about being "too poor to pay attention"? Looks like it ended up being true.

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

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be surprising (to me, anyway) if the case is that the low cognitive function of war-affected Syrian youths is the cause of their own poverty.

Intelligence is highly hereditable[1]. Intelligence is also highly correlated with earning potential, in middle-income Western Asian nations[2]. (It's correlated everywhere, but I cite that specifically because the study in the link was carried out in Jordan.) Therefore it's highly likely that high IQ refugee children, have high IQ refugee parents, who are earning a higher household income after they resettle into th…

Let's talk about treatment effect (or just plain old Occam's razor): what is the most likely cause statistically significant cognitive function decline in this treatment group.

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

#37
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been there. Once you start thinking to yourself that there is no long term future ahead of you, the kind of choices you make becomes almost like a sick joke. Buy some fruit and vegetables to eat so that you can feel nourished and live a long life, or eat some feel good salty sugar loaded fast food because you have no fucking future anyway? Study and gain employable skills or play video games right now because yo…

I know you are using your experience as an example...but I think with real poverty, you probably wouldnt know much about nutrition and neither would your parents...with enough caloric difficiency and without proper nutrition, much of the decision making/studying/long-term-planning abilities degrade quite rapidly.

That's the thing. I was pretty self-aware and I still made those choices. Imagine how much worse it is for people who don't even know what they're doing to themselves. They'll just keep pushing on ahead while their mind and body deteriorates.

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

#38
post #4

Imagine being so poor you can't concentrate on what tomorrow is. That is what being poor does to you. It robs you of thinking.

Or it's too hot or cold because you don't have temperature controls, so you could lose a few months of studious productivity per year.

This becomes even worse if your food supply is limited. Your body produces less heat if you’re not eating enough calories, which can make you feel cold even in a normal temperature.

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

#39
A point that merits consideration is whether or not refugee camps perpetuate poverty. For example, did wealthy Syrians end up in refugee camps? And if so, have they remained there? The same question can be asked about Palestinians decades ago. The point is this, as someone who immigrated to the U.S. from the Middle East as a minor, I think while the squalid conditions of refugee camps certainly affect cognitive function in refugee youth, the refugee camp youth probably came from (or were born into) lower socioeconomic strata of their home country. Does my question make sense? Is my assumption correct?

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

#40

Then again low cognitive function leads to poverty. Do they try to disambiguate that at all?

It would be surprising (to me, anyway) if the case is that the low cognitive function of war-affected Syrian youths is the cause of their own poverty.

I admit I didn't read the article, and the war angle does change a lot.

Still, unless you have zero influence on your circumstances, I would always expect the clever to end up in better situations than the less gifted.

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