Socioeconomic Differences in Social Information Processing and Cardiovascular Reactivity

Low socioeconomic status (SES) has a profound influence on children's physical health. As SES decreases, all-cause mortality rates increase linearly, 1 and rates of injury, pneumonia, and cancer mortality increase. 2 One potential explanation for the SES and health relationship may involve social information processing. Lower SES children, because of their more frequent exposure to unpredictable and stressful situations, may develop a schema about the world being a threatening place that requires constant vigilance. This schema may predispose children to interpreting a wide range of situations, including those that are ambiguous in outcome, as threat- ening. Children who display a bias toward interpreting ambiguous situations as threatening may also be prone to heightened cardiovascular reactivity during such situations. Over time, more frequent episodes of reactivity may place these children at risk for negative health outcomes such as cardiovascular disease (See F IG . 1). Research has demonstrated that lower SES is associated with heightened reactiv- ity to laboratory stressors 3 and higher resting levels of blood pressure 4 among chil- dren. Trait variables such as hostility mediate this relationship among African- American children. 3 In addition, adults in lower status occupations who also have hostile attributional styles have higher blood pressure elevations at work. 5 However, the role of situationally based variables such as social information-processing biases has not been investigated in children. We tested the mediational role of social information processing in a sample of 198 children (ages 8-17), half Caucasian and half African-American (Time 1: T1). Ninety of these children were retested an average of three years later (Time 2: T2). At both times, children were probed about perceptions of hostile intent and anger in response to scenarios with negative or ambiguous outcomes (Social Cognition Inter- view). At both times, cardiovascular reactivity was averaged across three laboratory stress tasks (mirror tracing, reaction time, cold forehead). SES was measured by family and paternal Hollingshead scores (based on parent education and occupa- tion). At T1, among Caucasians, low-SES children responded with more hostile intent perceptions and anger than high-SES children during ambiguous, but not negative, scenarios (see T ABLE 1). In addition, analyses of the reactivity data revealed that among Caucasians, lower SES was associated with greater vascular reactivity