Who is More Vulnerable to Threat Cues?

People assume that the decisions we make in the moment are the outcomes of who we are now. But, from the evolutionary perspective, growing research has documented that the environment people were exposed to when growing up, called childhood socioeconomic status (SES), often better predicts people’s decisions and judgments in adulthood. In another recently published paper [4], my coauthors and I find that the effect of health communication messages such as adding comparative statistics or positive statistical information on perceived threat and stockpiling intention depends on childhood SES. There are at least two reasons. Working memory plays a critical role in interpreting information, reasoning, and regulating emotions. However, childhood poverty can impair working memory due to repeated experiences of stress during childhood. Impaired working memory can impede the processing of contextual information for people with low childhood SES. Furthermore, exposure to cumulative psychological and physical stressors can also impair people’s affect-based processing such as recognizing emotional faces. Thus, people with low (vs. high) childhood SES may exhibit less emotional responses to negative information. In three experiments, we find converging evidence showing that additional statistics of a familiar event is more likely to lower stockpiling intention for people who grew up in benign environments (i.e., high childhood SES). They could better process information in the presence of a threat. But, people who grew up in adverse, resource-scarce environments could be not only vulnerable to threatening events, but are also less responsive to communication messages.