Socioeconomic Status and Health: What is the role of Reserve Capacity?

By Linda C Gallo, Karla Espinosa de los Monteros, S. Shivpuri. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2009

607 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A robust, linear association between socioeconomic status (SES) and health has been identified across many populations and health outcomes. This relationship is typically monotonic, so that each step down the SES hierarchy brings increased vulnerability to disease and premature mortality. Despite growing attention to health disparities, scientists and policymakers have made little progress toward confronting their causes and implementing effective solutions. Using the reserve capacity model (Gallo & Matthews, 2003) as an organizing framework, the current article examines the contribution of resilient psychosocial resources to socioeconomic disparities in physical health. Findings suggest that deficient psychosocial resources, such as low perceptions of control and social support, may be one of many factors that connect low SES with poor health. Additional research is needed to test these relationships and their underlying mechanisms, to consider interventions to enhance reserve capacity, and to evaluate the efficacy of such efforts in fostering resilience to socioeconomic hardship.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/544fbef275d2113e9a32283d79ea3edc41a83c2b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Health Professions

1. Brandon H Hidaka
2. F. Worrell
3. Dacher Keltner
4. Stefan Thau
5. Lisa A. Brenner
6. Jennifer Carson Marr

In Health

1. Brandon H Hidaka
2. Dacher Keltner
3. Stefan Thau
4. Jennifer Carson Marr

Citations in the corpus

• Pathways between socioeconomic status and health: Does health selection or social causation dominate in Europe? (2018, result): “On the other hand, our finding that causation increases and selection decreases towards higher ages is not in line with previous evidence that selection is especially important in older working ages, where many health problems start to become more prevalent (Smith, 1998; Smith, 2003).”
• Social Determinants of Risk and Outcomes for Cardiovascular Disease: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association (2015, positive): “Social capital factors such as social support and cohesion are associated with health behaviors and CVD risk and vary across the socioeconomic spectrum.(244) For example, social support from family and friends has been cross-sectionally associated with level of physical activity,(245) and family emo”
• Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College (neutral): “In any case, the identification of pre-Achaemenid deposits at Akra has perhaps greater implications for our understanding of the effects of the Achaemenid empire in the east than the historical identification of the settlement, and it is to this issue that we will now turn.”
• Reliability and Validity of Family Affluence Scale (FAS II) among Adolescents in Beijing, China (2011, background): “For an adult population, SES is traditionally assessed by education, occupation and income (Ostrove and Adler 1998).”
• Depression as a disease of modernity: explanations for increasing prevalence (2012, background): “Given the relationship between health, socioeconomic status and depression (Adler et al., 1994), it seems counterintuitive that the most modernized countries, using gross domestic product (GDP) per capita as a quantitative measure of modernization, tend to have higher rates of depression (see Fig.”
• The magic of hope: Hope mediates the relationship between socioeconomic status and academic achievement (2018, background): “The perception of a stressor or situation in general has powerful implications for how one responds (Adler & Ostrove, 1999; Cohen et al., 1999).”
• Ten questions concerning the built environment and mental health (2019, background): “Due to the connection between SES and health conditions, studies often use SES as one controlled variable, neglecting the issue that it is measured as a continuous scale [208].”
• Falling from great (and not-so-great) heights: how initial status position influences performance after status loss (2014, positive): “Gallo, Espinosa de los Monteros, and Shivpuri (2009) suggested that high-status individuals have more psychosocial resources (e.g., control beliefs), and these resources enable them to be more resilient when facing adversity.”