LillyBelle K. Deer is currently a PhD candidate in the Department
of Psychology at the University of California, Davis.
LillyBelle does research in Child and Health Psychology. Their
most recent publication is ‘Autonomic nervous system activity
predicts increasing serum inflammatory cytokines in children.’
Children growing up in economically disadvantaged contexts are at risk of underperforming academically. Why is this? One explanation may be underdeveloped ‘executive function’, an important collection of attention-regulation skills. Executive function is malleable in childhood, indeed—interventions have been effective in improving it, especially among children facing adversity. In a recent study, we set out to examine whether early-life family income predicted long-term academic achievement, and to investigate the role of executive function in explaining this association.
