Childhood family socioeconomic status is linked to adult brain electrophysiology

Abstract

A large body of research has linked childhood family socioeconomic status (SES) to neurodevelopment in childhood and adolescence. However, it remains unclear to what extent childhood family SES relates to brain functioning in adulthood. To address this gap, the present study investigated the associations between retrospective accounts of objective and subjective childhood family SES and two well-established electrophysiological indices of brain functioning in adulthood-the MMN and P3b event-related potentials (ERP) components, as neural correlates of automatic change detection and cognitive control respectively. Higher objective childhood family SES, as proxied by parent educational attainment in childhood, was associated with larger (more positive) P3b amplitudes in adulthood. In contrast, there was no association between childhood parent educational attainment and the magnitude of MMN. Adult reports of subjective family SES during childhood were not related to the magnitude of MMN or P3b. These findings suggest that the links between childhood parent educational attainment and brain functioning may extend into adulthood, especially for brain functions supporting cognitive control. These results also imply that, when using retrospective accounts of childhood family SES, objective and subjective reports likely proxy different childhood experiences that have distinct links with specific neurodevelopmental outcomes, and that some of these links may not persist into adulthood. Our findings lay the groundwork for future investigations on how and why childhood family SES relates to brain functioning in adulthood.

Fig 1. Configuration of the scalp electrodes.

Channels shaded in orange are included in the frontocentral cluster used for MMN analyses. Channels shaded in blue are included in the posterior cluster used for P3b analyses.

Fig 2

Scatter plot for the zero-order correlations between childhood parent educational attainment and ERP mean amplitude scores for MMN (a) and P3b (b).

Fig 3

Scatter plot for the zero-order correlations between childhood subjective family SES and ERP mean amplitude scores for MMN (a) and P3b (b).

Fig 4. Grand average ERP plots for frequent (black waveform) and rare (red waveform) trials over the parietal channel cluster used for measuring P3b in the visual oddball task.

By convention, negative is plotted upward. P3b was measured between 300–600 ms post-stimulus onset. This figure is only created for visual illustration purposes and includes only adults who reported high school diploma or less for their childhood parent educational attainment (left; n = 38) versus adults who reported bachelor’s degree or above for their childhood parent educational attainment (right; n = 21). The grand average was not plotted for the participants who reported some college classes without any degree completion for their childhood parent educational attainment since the sample size of this group was very small (n = 6).