Funding

Poverty impedes cognitive function.

Certain PhD programs need to take notice.  The funding here is all right; not the best, but then, OK is not an expensive place, so on the whole it holds its own.  But… we have to pay fees.  Tuition waiver, yes, we’ve got that.  But, I quote (loosely), “as per university policy, we cannot waive the fees.  But they only add up to around $1200.”  Serious rounding down going on; I was charged nearly $1400 in fees for this semester.  Because we don’t get a real paycheck until September 30th, and the fees were due yesterday… well a certain amount of financial stress has been going on.  Not that one paycheck will solve the problem (after all, it’s not much of a paycheck; just twice as  much as the half-month pay we get in August).  Waiving the fees (most universities do that for their doctoral students, at least most of the ones I applied to) would solve it.  At least that particular financial anxiety trigger.

Of course, PhD students are not really poor.  Not the inescapable poverty that traps people in a vicious circle for generations; the mind-numbing (and now we’ve got scientific evidence that calling poverty  mind numbing, or any other such subjectively descriptive term, is not merely an echo of DH Lawrence and Dickens) exhaustion of putting food on the table, making ends meet, juggling bills and paychecks; the poverty of thought caused by lack of access, lack of time, lack of desire, because all kinds of true exhaustion leave the mind blank.  PhD students don’t usually experience the inevitable poverty of a future without promise of betterment (even those of us in psychology–the lowest of the low for income earnings with “only” a bachelor’s degree–can imagine some point at which we’ll have a Real Job).  So ok, we’re not ineluctable poverty poor… but the point of the Science piece linked above is that there is a real cognitive decline in response to immediate perceptions of financial hardship.

To summarize: the researchers carried out two studies, one controlled lab experiment with shoppers recruited at a New Jersey mall, one field study of small sugar cane farmers in India.  In the lab experiment, they looked at how income interacted with primed financial anxiety to affect cognitive ability on a range of tests.  (Amusing that they used the same pattern recognition test we used in undergrad research methods a few weeks ago; social rejection also impairs cognitive performance.)  Lower income participants did more poorly than higher income participants, but only when primed to think of difficult financial situations.  Good experimental design, decent effect sizes (ie money anxiety DID make a difference, and the difference was substantial).

For the field study, they looked at small farmers in India before (no money) and after (paid) the harvest.  Farmers performed worse on both cognitive ability (the pattern recognition test) and cognitive control (reaction time) before the harvest. To control for crop-yield anxiety and physical tiredness, they tested a group after the harvest was actually in, but before the farmers had been paid; there was a similar effect.  In other words, it’s not the physical exhaustion or the worry about yield, but the lack of money.  Of course, nutrition cold also play a role, as they acknowledge.  But they argue, convincingly, that cognitive load is the root of the stupidity  effect (my nomenclature); that is, the attention paid to financial difficulties, even when directed to focus on something else, takes away from the brain’s ability to think.

I completely agree.  The lists and calculations I have been making over the last month take up real time that could be dedicated to study, research, or writing, but I am also certain that even when I am studying, planning research, reviewing the literature, or writing, I am not doing it well.  I am uninspired, dull; I think longingly of life as a galloper, horse trainer, or even groom; maybe a bartender.  Maybe even, in my most desperate moments, as teacher of small children 😉  I took the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test along with the students in lab a few weeks ago, and I missed TWO.  Two!!!  I usually get perfect scores on pattern recognition.  My mind is being eaten away by university-fee attentional load, even when passing the time in lab.  What it must be doing to my inspirational research design planning self….

Here is the New York Times piece that led me to the Science article.  They probably do a better job of explaining the phenomena than I do; certainly much less self-centered 😛