Socioeconomic status impacts cognitive and socioemotional processes in healthy ageing

Abstract

Socioeconomic status (SES) negatively impacts cognitive and executive functioning in older adults, yet its effects on socioemotional abilities have not been studied in this population. Also, evidence on neurocognitive processes associated with ageing primarily comes from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) populations, hindering the generalization of findings to persons from upper-middle- and low‐middle‐income countries, such as those of Latin America. Here, we compared the performance of low- and high-SES older adults from Argentina in cognitive state, executive functions, social cognition (emotion recognition and theory of mind), and counter-empathic social emotions (envy and Schadenfreude; displeasure at others’ fortune and pleasure at others’ misfortune, respectively). Subsequently, we developed a path analysis to test the relationship among those variables in a theoretically plausible model and tested the main paths via multiple regression analyses. Relative to the high-SES group, low-SES older adults showed poorer performance on all assessed domains. Convergent evidence from covariance analysis, path analysis, and linear regressions suggested that low-SES impact on socioemotional processes was not primary but mediated by cognitive and executive impairment. These findings offer the first characterization of SES impacts on cognitive and socioemotional processes in a non-WEIRD population and have relevant equity-related implications for brain health.

Overactivation of posterior insular, postcentral and temporal regions during preserved experience of envy in autism

“…Third, we used an indirect measure of envy (i.e., by asking participants to rate their level of displeasure). In keeping with previous studies (Baez et al, 2016(Baez et al, , 2018(Baez et al, , 2020Franco-O'Byrne et al, 2021;G omez-Carvajal et al, 2020;Migeot et al, 2022;Santamaría-García et al, 2017), we followed the standard administration of the task, which aims to reduce biases related to social desirability (Jankowski & Takahashi, 2014;Smith et al, 1999). In addition, the envy-related activation results in the whole group engaged regions critically associated with this social emotion (Luo et al, 2018;McDonald et al, 2020;Santamaría-García et al, 2017;Takahashi et al, 2009), and exploratory parametric analyses results pointed in the same direction (Material 3.2 in the supporting information).…”

“…We employed a modified and fMRI adapted version of a well‐validated envy task (Baez et al, 2016, 2018, 2020; Franco‐O'Byrne et al, 2021; Gómez‐Carvajal et al, 2020; Migeot et al, 2022; Santamaría‐García et al, 2017) developed based on Takahashi et al (2009). Before the scanning session, each participant was shown a real‐life photograph and a description of two target characters representing the protagonists of a series of fictional events.…”

“…Participants were asked to rate the intensity of their experience of envy in terms of displeasure as this is the standard procedure for this task (Baez et al, 2016, 2018, 2020; Franco‐O'Byrne et al, 2021; Gómez‐Carvajal et al, 2020; Migeot et al, 2022; Santamaría‐García et al, 2017). Displeasure is the main overarching state elicited by envy (Smith & Kim, 2007; Tai et al, 2012; Takahashi et al, 2009).…”

“…In this study, we used an fMRI version of a well‐validated task (Baez et al, 2016, 2018, 2020; Franco‐O'Byrne et al, 2021; Gómez‐Carvajal et al, 2020; Migeot et al, 2022; Santamaría‐García et al, 2017) to investigate the subjective experience of envy and its neural correlates in adults with ASD relative to NT controls. We hypothesize that participants with ASD will show difficulties in their experience of envy, reflected either at the behavioural level (as lower self‐report) or at the neural level (as overactivation of related brain regions) in the case of comparable performance to NT controls.…”

Occupational Prestige: The Status Component of Socioeconomic Status

“…It is hard to overstate the importance of an individual's standing in the social and economic hierarchy of society, or their socioeconomic status (SES), to their experience of daily life and important life outcomes. For example, studies have shown that SES influences development (Evans & English, 2002;Judd et al, 2020;Luby et al, 2013;Moriguchi et al, 2019), health (Adler et al, 1994;Lago et al, 2018), and well-being (Tan et al, 2020), and can also impact cognition (Mani et al, 2013;Migeot et al, 2022). Measuring where an individual stands in the socioeconomic hierarchy is not straightforward, and the consistency with which SES impacts life outcomes is matched by the inconsistency with which it is measured.…”