Posts tagged poverty
More Americans lived in poverty in 2010 than in any other time that records have been collected, according to US Census data released yesterday. Median household income fell, too, and a growing number of people are without health insurance.
An additional 2.6 million people became officially poor last year, raising the poverty rate from 14.3 percent in 2009 to 15.1 percent. It was the fourth year in a row that the ranks of the poor grew, and Sawhill predicts poverty rates will rise to 16 percent by 2014.
More people live in poverty than ever before, but the Tea Party says we need to protect the wealthy. HMMMMMM.
(via think4yourself)
How Poverty Shapes the Brain (The Globe and Mail)
robot-heart-politics:psychotherapy:
Over the past four decades, researchers have established how poverty shapes lives, that low socioeconomic status is associated with poor academic performance, poor mental and physical health and other negative outcomes. Dr. Swain is part of a new generation of neuroscientists investigating how poverty shapes the brain.
The University of Michigan
researcher will use a number of imaging technologies to compare the structure and function of brains of young adults from families with low socioeconomic status to those who are middle-class…
Studies suggest a number of areas of the brain may be affected by low socioeconomic status, including the circuitry involved in language, memory and in executive functions, a set of skills that help us focus on a problem and solve it.
But Amedeo D’Angiulli at Carleton University in Ottawa wants to steer his fellow researchers away from the idea that they should be looking for poverty-related deficits. At an Association for Psychological Science conference in Boston this week, he will urge them to think about any differences they find as potential strengths, not weaknesses.
“I would see this work informing the school system, to exploit some of the strengths that are in these children and introduce curriculum that instead of penalizing them would allow them to function,” he said.
