Cognitive epidemiology: With emphasis on untangling cognitive ability and socioeconomic status
Section snippets
Two dominant currents of research in cognitive epidemiology
Cognitive epidemiology research has two dominant themes: first, the indirect effect of cognitive ability on health through decision-making, and second, health and cognitive ability as two indicators of an individual's system integrity. The first theme addresses the judgment and decision-making required for developing a healthy lifestyle, avoiding health risks, and exercising preventive medicine. All of these tasks require cognitive competencies for acquiring and effectively using new
Untangling cognitive ability and socioeconomic status
In one of the earliest studies of cognitive epidemiology, Terman (1925) studied the health and medical histories of 1528 participants in the top 1% in GCA (or IQ). In arguably the most famous longitudinal study in psychology, Terman (1925) examined the relationship between intellectual talent and psychological and physical health. At the time, speculation held that the intellectually able were physically weak and sickly relative to their normative peers. A common saying back then was “early to
An epidemiology of differential psychology: a quantitative and qualitative expansion of cognitive epidemiology
Two topics will be touched upon in this section. First, cognitive epidemiology may be expanded to include an epidemiology of promise, and second, a qualitative expansion of cognitive epidemiology to other non-cognitive dimensions of human psychological diversity is possible as well. While this special issue is justifiably focused on negative health outcomes as a function of GCA, there is a flip side to cognitive epidemiology: the examination of the relationships between positive human outcomes
Cognitive epidemiology and normal science
A major portion of this commentary has been devoted to the importance of untangling GCA and SES. There are multiple reasons for this, and they extend beyond cognitive epidemiology and broadly cover the bio-behavioral sciences. In the neurosciences, for example, a neuroscience of poverty is emerging and multiple studies in this arena neglect the possibility that ability is a more important determinant of the neurological phenomena under analysis than SES is (Hackman and Farah, 2008, Lipina and
Acknowledgments
Support for this article was provided by a Research and Training Grant from the Templeton Foundation and National Institute of Child Health and Development Grant P30 HD to the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development. Earlier versions of this article benefited from comments from Avshalom Caspi, Kimberley Ferriman Robertson, Linda S. Gottfredson, Arthur R. Jensen, John C. Loehlin, Terrie E. Moffitt, Gregory Park, and Jonathan Wai.
References (59)
- et al.
Premorbid (early life) IQ and later mortality risk: Systematic review
Annals of Epidemiology
(2007) Psychometrics, intelligence, and public perception
Intelligence
(1997)- et al.
Some bodily and medical correlates of mathematical giftedness and commensurate levels of socioeconomic status
Intelligence
(1992) - et al.
Incorporating general intelligence into epidemiology and the social sciences
Intelligence
(1997) - et al.
Childhood mental ability and lifetime psychiatric contact a 66-year follow-up study of the 1932 Scottish Mental Survey
Intelligence
(2002) - et al.
Multipotentiality among intellectually gifted: “It was never there and already it's vanishing.”
Journal of Counseling Psychology
(1996) Looking beyond the borders of the health sector: The socioeconomic determinants of health
- et al.
Socioeconomic status and health: The challenge of the gradient
American Psychologist
(1994) - et al.
Childhood IQ in relation to later psychiatric disorder: Evidence from the Danish birth cohort study
British Journal of Psychiatry
(2005) Logical foundations of probability
(1950)