Research has shown robust
relationships between community violence and psychopathology, yet relatively
little is known about the ways in which community violence may affect cognitive
performance and attention.
The present study estimates the effects of
police-reported community violence on 359 urban children's performance on a
computerized neuropsychological task using a quasi-experimental fixed-effects
design. Living in close proximity to a recent violent crime predicted faster
but marginally less accurate task performance for the full sample,
evolutionarily adaptive patterns of “vigilant” attention (i.e., less attention
toward positive stimuli, more attention toward negative stimuli) for children
reporting low trait anxiety, and potentially maladaptive patterns of “avoidant”
attention for highly anxious children. These results suggest that community
violence can directly affect children's cognitive performance while also having
different (and potentially orthogonal) impacts on attention deployment
depending on children's levels of biobehavioral risk.
Implications for mental
health and sociological research are discussed.
...Specifically, we find that children whose cognitive
performance was assessed within one week after a violent event occurred within
a half mile of their home were faster and marginally less accurate in locating
the position of a dot on a computer screen than their peers who came from the
same community but who were assessed either before or well after a violent
crime took place. These results suggest that the physiological and mental
demands of dealing with an environmental stressor may reduce children's cognitive
capacity to focus on a simple task and instead lead to more automatic (i.e.,
faster but error-prone) task performance. Such impulsive response patterns are
in line with clinical research showing short-term impairments in information
processing, effortful control, and other aspects of higher-order
self-regulation following trauma (Brandes et al. 2002; Nader and Fairbanks 1994) and may help to
explain previously observed reductions in children's academic performance and
regulatory capacity following exposure to homicide (Sharkey 2010; Sharkey et al. 2012).
Future research that includes longitudinal data on psychological and behavioral
functioning is needed to understand the degree to which the short-term effects
of violent crime on cognitive performance may lead to more stable deficits in
mental/behavioral health over time.
Importantly, the observed relationship between
community violence and average response time was driven primarily by children
reporting low trait anxiety (a proxy for low levels of biobehavioral arousal),
whereas highly anxious children maintained relatively consistent response time
regardless of violence. Differential response patterns for children
characterized by varying levels of anxiety were also observed when testing
children's selective attention outcomes. Children with low levels of trait
anxiety who were assessed immediately after a nearby violent event showed
vigilant response patterns, including increased attention toward negative
images and decreased attention toward positive images compared to their peers
who were assessed before or well after a crime took place. Highly anxious
children, on the other hand, exhibited response patterns more associated with
avoidance, including decreased attention toward negative images and increased
attention toward positive images following a crime. Consistent across analyses,
the magnitude of the impact of violence on child outcomes was largest when the
violent crime took place within a short distance from children's homes and
within a short time period prior to assessment...
Below: Approximate Locationa of Participant Homes and Total Violent Crimes by 2000 Census Tract.
aAlthough precise address location was used for actual analyses, dots in Figure 1 represent a random location in children's residential census tract to maintain confidentiality.
Full article at:
By:
1New York University, New York, NY, USA
2Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Corresponding Author: Dana McCoy, Harvard University, Center on the
Developing Child, 50 Church St., Rm 415, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Email: ude.dravrah.esg@yoccm_anad
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