Childhood socioeconomic deprivation, but not current mood, is associated with behavioural disinhibition in adults

Abstract

There is evidence to suggest that impulsivity is predicted by socioeconomic background, with people from more deprived backgrounds tending to be more impulsive, and by current mood, with poorer mood associated with greater impulsivity. However, impulsivity is not a unitary construct, and previous research in this area has focused on measures of ‘waiting’ impulsivity rather than behavioural disinhibition. We administered a standard measure of behavioural disinhibition, the stop-signal task, to 58 adult participants from a community sample. We had measured socioeconomic background using participant postcode at age 16, and assigned participants to receive either a neutral or a negative mood induction. We found no effects of mood on behavioural disinhibition, but we found a significant effect of socioeconomic background. Participants with more deprived postcodes at age 16 showed longer stop-signal reaction times, and hence greater behavioural disinhibition. The pattern was independent of participant age and overall reaction time. Greater behavioural disinhibition may be a consequence of experiencing childhood socioeconomic deprivation, and could play a role in maintaining social gradients in outcomes such as addiction.

Does Hunger Contribute to Socioeconomic Gradients in Behavior?

“…Whilst there is evidence of stable, personality-like individual differences in proneness to impulsivity ( Odum, 2011 ), contemporary research has established that impulsivity can also vary markedly in relation to context or the subject’s state ( Kidd et al, 2013 ; Lempert and Phelps, 2016 ). Lower-SEP individuals have been found to be less patient in terms of waiting ( Green et al, 1996 ; Adams and White, 2009 ) and more disinhibited in terms of stopping ( Paál et al, 2015 ). The chief motivation for studying the SEP-impulsivity association in adults has been the hypothesis that greater impulsivity statistically mediates the relationships between SEP on the one hand and health-damaging behaviors on the other ( Adams and White, 2009 ; Ward et al, 2009 ).…”

Places Change Minds: Exploring the Psychology of Urbanicity Using a Brief Contemplation Method

“…Thus, the psychological processing styles and beliefs associated with depression, anxiety, and paranoid feelings are also associated with living in impoverished neighborhoods (Chen & Paterson, 2006;Ross & Mirowsky, 2009;Witt, 1989). Paál, Carpenter, and Nettle (2015) found that neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES) predicted individual levels of behavioral inhibition, a characteristic invariably associated with impulsive traits and future discounting. Furthermore, and directly relevant to the paradigm employed in this study, Liu, Feng, Suo, Lee, and Li (2012) explored how brief exposure to cues of poverty or affluence influenced the intertemporal choices made by their participants.…”