Socioeconomic hardship and delayed reward discounting: Associations with working memory and emotional reactivity

Abstract

Prolonged exposure to socioeconomic hardship (SH) is associated with greater delayed reward discounting (DRD), a form of impulsive decision-making that reflects a reduced capacity to delay gratification and a significant correlate of diverse risk behaviors, but the neurobehavioral mechanisms linking SH and DRD are unknown. An emerging hypothesis suggests that cognitive and affective stress associated with poverty may tax neurocognitive functions, such as working memory (WM), and lead to impulsive DRD. Furthermore, research suggests that emotional reactivity (ER) is an important dispositional factor to consider in the link between executive functions and DRD. Thus, we longitudinally examined the indirect effect of SH on impulsive DRD via a network of brain regions associated with WM function in a sample of young adults, and whether that link was moderated by ER. Participants were 119 rural African Americans (aged 19-24 years) assessed behaviorally on four occasions, with fMRI at the last time point. Results showed that, among emerging adults with higher ER, SH severity was predictive of increased DRD via reduced response in brain regions activated during an n-back WM task. These findings reveal both the cognitive and affective mechanisms that underlie the relationship between SH and DRD.

Social Determinants of Delayed Gratification Among American Children

“…Racial and ethnic differences in the effects of family SES are reported for other psychological factors such as inhibitory control [42], fun seeking [27], and impulsivity [28]. The unique contribution of this paper is to enrich the literature on differential effects of family income on delay gratification and delayed discounting which are correlated with a wide range of high-risk behaviors [24,29,30,32,39].…”

“…Poor delayed gratification (high delay discounting) has implications for a wide range of outcomes such as obesity, sex, tobacco usage, alcohol usage, drug abuse, and gambling [29]. In literature, poor delayed gratification can be measured as a high delay discounting [32].…”

Adverse Parenting Is Indirectly Linked to Delayed Reward Discounting via Blunted RSA Reactivity: the Protective Role of a Shift-and-Persist Coping Strategy

“…Deprivation, in contrast, corroborates the acts of omission that is manifested by neglectful behaviors (e.g., physical, emotional, medical, and educational neglect; Manly et al, 1994;Weber et al, 2016). Empirical evidence indicates that both threat and deprivation dimensions of adverse parenting are linked to youths' impulsive DRD (Oshri et al, 2019;. However, the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the effects of threat Fig.…”

Race, Ethnicity, Family Socioeconomic Status, and Children’s Hippocampus Volume

“…High socioeconomic status (SES) (Oshri et al, 2019) protects children against antisocial behaviors (Palma-Coca et al, 2011), school problems (Sirin, 2005), learning disorders (Fluss et al, 2009), attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (Assari & Caldwell, 2019a;Collins & Cleary, 2016;Jablonska et al, 2020;Machlin, McLaughlin, & Sheridan, 2019), aggression (Heshmat et al, 2016), early sexual initiation (Feldstein Ewing et al, 2018), and use of tobacco (Barreto, de Figueiredo, & Giatti, 2013;Kaleta, Usidame, Dziankowska-Zaborszczyk, & Makowiec-Dabrowska, 2015), alcohol (Moore & Littlecott, 2015;Silveira et al, 2014), and drugs (Gerra et al, 2020). The effects are partially attributed to the effects of SES on brain development (Javanbakht et al, 2015;Masten, Telzer, & Eisenberger, 2011;Wu et al, 2015).…”