Abstract
Several studies have identified associations between poverty and development of self-regulation during childhood, which is broadly defined as those skills involved in cognitive, emotional, and stress self-regulation. These skills are influenced by different individual and contextual factors at multiple levels of analysis (i.e., individual, family, social, and cultural). Available evidence suggests that the influences of those biological, psychosocial, and sociocultural factors on emotional and cognitive development can vary according to the type, number, accumulation of risks, and co-occurrence of adverse circumstances that are related to poverty, the time in which these factors exert their influences, and the individual susceptibility to them. Complementary, during the past three decades, several experimental interventions that were aimed at optimizing development of self-regulation of children who live in poverty have been designed, implemented, and evaluated. Their results suggest that it is possible to optimize different aspects of cognitive performance and that it would be possible to transfer some aspects of these gains to other cognitive domains and academic achievement. We suggest that it is an important task for ethics, notably but not exclusively neuroethics, to engage in this interdisciplinary research domain to contribute analyses of key concepts, arguments, and interpretations. The specific evidence that neuroscience brings to the analyses of poverty and its implications needs to be spelled out in detail and clarified conceptually, notably in terms of causes of and attitudes toward poverty, implications of poverty for brain development, and for the possibilities to reduce and reverse these effects.
Highlights
Contemporary neuroscientific studies of the influences of poverty on cognitive, emotional, and stress regulation systems propose to analyze how different individual and contextual factors that are associated with material, emotional, and symbolic deprivation, influence neural development
Neuroscience, Childhood Poverty and Ethics effects of such influences at different levels of organization at different stages of development; (b) the identification of mechanisms through which these influences exert their impact; (c) how these influences are or are not modified by interventions; and (d) at what times or stages of development do such factors have the greatest impact and, when it is more rational to implement targeted interventions to optimize self-regulation (Lipina and Posner, 2012; Lipina, 2015; Lipina and Segretin, 2015; Johnson et al, 2016; Ursache and Noble, 2016). Each of these aspects of study is associated in different ways with problems that are related to ethical implications, such as the violation of rights and dignity, decreased capacity, the determination of social responsibilities, and the potential deprivation of identity
The modern research area of “neuroethics” that investigates the neurobiological basis of morality and the ethical, social, and legal issues raised by neuroscientific research (Evers et al, 2017) has not begun to address these issues seriously
Summary
Contemporary neuroscientific studies of the influences of poverty on cognitive, emotional, and stress regulation systems propose to analyze how different individual and contextual factors that are associated with material, emotional, and symbolic deprivation (i.e., lack of food, shelter, education, and health-care), influence neural development. Neuroscience, Childhood Poverty and Ethics effects of such influences at different levels of organization (i.e., molecular, systemic, cognitive, and behavioral) at different stages of development; (b) the identification of mechanisms through which these influences exert their impact (i.e., mediators and moderators); (c) how these influences are or are not modified by interventions; and (d) at what times or stages of development do such factors have the greatest impact and, when it is more rational to implement targeted interventions to optimize self-regulation (i.e., critical and sensitive periods) (Lipina and Posner, 2012; Lipina, 2015; Lipina and Segretin, 2015; Johnson et al, 2016; Ursache and Noble, 2016) Each of these aspects of study is associated in different ways with problems that are related to ethical implications, such as the violation of rights and dignity, decreased capacity, the determination of social responsibilities, and the potential deprivation of identity. The aim of this paper is to give to an audience of researchers from neuroscience and ethics an analysis of the ethical implications of the neuroscientific evidence on the influences of childhood poverty on self-regulatory development in terms of rights, dignity, capacity, and social responsibilities, so that we might foster dialog between the involved scientific disciplines
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