Is There a Biology of Misfortune? Stress, Reactivity and Social Disparities in Child Development
Friday, 2:30 PM - 4:15 PM
Hynes CC 312

Speaker: W. Thomas Boyce, University of British Columbia
Chair: Megan Gunnar, University of Minnesota

Biographical Sketch
W. Thomas Boyce, M.D. is the Sunny Hill Health Centre/BC Leadership Chair in Child Development in the Human Early Learning Partnership and the Centre for Community Child Health Research at the University of British Columbia. He is also a Fellow of the Experience-Based Brain and Biological Development Programme, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and a member of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. A social epidemiologist and developmental-behavioral pediatrician, Boyce’s research addresses the interplay among neurobiological and psychosocial processes leading to socially partitioned differences in childhood disease.

Abstract
Epidemiological evidence indicates that low socioeconomic status (SES) is a strong, enduring risk factor for maladaptive outcomes among children from virtually all human societies. Some portion of this association is attributable to the influence of poverty on access to health care, diet, experience with enriched learning environments, and exposures to physical toxins. Differentials in developmental outcomes may also be due, however, to class-related inequities in children’s experiences of psychological stress and adversity. Further, the graded, continuous nature of SES-development relations suggests a deeper, more pervasive influence of social position, rather than an effect of poverty alone. Recent studies in my laboratories at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of British Columbia have examined the influence of neurobiologic stress reactivity on health and development among children of different SES subgroups and different social positions within peer hierarchies. Findings from these studies advance the following questions: Does social class calibrate the reactivity of stress-responsive neural circuitry? Do experiences of dominance and subordination in early peer groups play a role in such calibration? Why has biological reactivity to stress persisted from environments of evolutionary adaptedness, in so substantial a subset of children? What are the mechanisms by which differences in early experience are ‘embodied’ in the patterning of neurobiological responses to contextual events? Is there a biology of misfortune?