Journal Article Summary
Effects of Early Life Stress and Social Isolation on Children’s Behavior
Introduction
A child’s perception of stressful events play a key role in shaping their long-term
developmental outcomes. This studt casts a light on the relationship between early life stress and
a criticial component of learning in children (Smith & Pollak, 2021). For a child, learning to
attach value to cues within the envirnomet which include reward, threat, safety, etc., is extremely
essential for adaptive decision making as life progresses.
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to address two gaps within prior research. The first gap being
that predicitive value learning is often evaluated as a single process (Smith & Pollak, 2022). One
component of the first gap ultimately encompasses children needing to be able to effectively
learn problematic relations between neutral or unfamiliar stimuli based on an outcome. The
second component expresses how children must harness new information to adaptively guide
their behaviors (Smith & Pollak, 2022). Another gap in prior research involves how childhood
stress is conceptualized and measured.
Hypothesis
The hypothesis for this study is to test the relationship between stressful event exposures,
perceived social isolation, and a child’s learning value to determine if stressful event exposures
and perceived social isolation are associated differently with two components of value learning
(Smith & Pollak, 2022).
2
Methodology
Sample
The participants in this study were 72 eight to nine year old children due to the fact that
within this age range, this is the earliest period where children reliable exhibit appetitive and
aversive conditional learning (Smith & Pollak, 2021). The children participants also received a
toy prize and their parents received $25 for just participating in the study.
Procedures
At the beginning of the study, children completed a cocnditional learning task that
assessed their ability to learn associations between neutral stimuli and valued outcomes (Smith &
Pollak, 2021). Once this task was completed, the children went on to completing an approach
and avoidance task, which assessed whether or not they used information that they had learned in
the conditioning task to guide their behavior. Following this, the children completed several tests
such as the Matrix Reasoning and Vocabulary subtests, the Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for
Children, and the Child Depression Inventory (Smith & Pollak, 2021). All of these tests
accounted for a child’s symptoms of ddepression and/or anxiety. Once these tests were
completed, the participants completed an explicit recall task after the conditioning task and prior
to the behavioral choice task. During this, parents reported their individual child’s exposure to
stressful events within their life as well as children reporting their own perceptions of social
isolation.
Results
The results of this study were particularly interesting. One result was that researchers did
Not find results that suggested that children’s stressful even exposures and perceptions of social
isolation affect their ability to learn value information. However, they did find that there are
3
associations between stressful event exposures, perceptions of social isolation, and a child’s
performance on the behavioral choice task (Smith & Pollak, 2021). Another interesting result
within this study is that children who have more stressful event exposure were more likely to
avoid both positive and negative reinforcers (Smtih & Pollak, 2021). A researcher would think
that this would only affect negative reinforcers and not affect positive ones. One of the results in
which supports the hypothesis of this study is that children with more stressful event exposure
were more likely to avoid, but only if they reported higher levels of perceived social isolation
(Smith & Pollak, 2021). Going along with this, children who produce lower levels of perceived
social isolation expressed no difference in how they avoided reinforcers regardless of their
exposure to stressful events within their life (Smith & Pollak, 2021).
Practical Significance
This study is significant because it enables a deeper understanding that stress within
childhood appears to disrupt the translation of learned information into behavior (Smith &
Pollak, 2021). Studies like this can help society know how to handle a child who has experienced
stressful events or been exposed to a stressful event succeed academically. The study executed
here shows how children in an environment where it is perceived as high threatening learn
contingent relations but they tend to use that knowledge to prioritize avoiding threats within their
lives (Smith & Pollak, 2021). Overall, this study highlights the importance of children’s event
exposures where early life experiences can ultimately affect a child’s development of brain-
behavior relations.
4
