John Ziker
Professor John Ziker, chair of the anthropology department, has been awarded a 2016-2017 Fulbright award titled the Canada-Palix Foundation Distinguished Visiting Research Chair in Brain Science, and Child and Family Health and Wellness.
His project will investigate the effects of prenatal conditions, early- and middle-childhood stress, social support and neighborhood quality on the development of mental health problems, such as addiction and depression, in the Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY). The study was conducted in eight cycles between 1994-2009 by Statistics Canada. The NLSCY was designed to collect information about factors influencing a child’s social, emotional and behavioral development over time.
“I became interested in this topic after reading a publication by Daniel Nettle, an evolutionary psychologist at U. Newcastle, about his work on another longitudinal survey, the 1958 National Childhood Development Study,” Ziker explained. Nettle found that childhood psychosocial adversity was associated with health deterioration through adulthood and acceleration of reproductive scheduling among women. “At the same time, Fulbright announced the Distinguished Chair in Brain Science and Family Wellness and I discovered the NLSCY in the Statistics Canada catalog. This dovetailed nicely with my interests in human life history evolution and a number of other excellent analyses being done by evolutionary anthropologists on large national datasets.”
He added: “Depressive disorders are the leading cause of disease burden across the globe according to findings from the 2010 Global Burden of Disease Study,” while explaining that depression also contributes to other sources of disease burden such as suicide risk and heart disease. “Improving models for the causes of depression and drug addictions, and the role such disorders play as risk factors for other health outcomes, is important for implementing cost-effective interventions across North America and beyond, following Ellis et al. 2012 in “‘The evolutionary basis of risky adolescent behavior: implications for science, policy, and practice.”
There also is mounting evidence that addictions and depression are transmitted inter-generationally in a non-genetic or epigenetic manner. For example, the impact of the residential school system in Canada on the long-term mental health of First Nations children educated in the system, their families and children, underscores the need for improved understanding of the developmental causes and mechanisms of inter-generational transmission of addiction and mental health disorders.
As Ziker explains, recent analyses of other longitudinal data found that high childhood psychosocial adversity is associated with health deterioration throughout adulthood and accelerated reproductive schedules. In addition, people raised in stressful environments have stronger preferences for immediate over delayed rewards, and such orientation to the present is argued to include psychological traits, such as vigilance, impulsivity and future discounting.
Furthermore, people raised in initially supportive environments have been shown to shift toward a present-orientation when exposed to harsh and unpredictable social and environmental cues.
Ziker’s research will investigate the possible adaptive rationale behind these findings in the Canadian longitudinal survey: how do maternal conditions, traumatic social events and conversely, supportive social relationships, affect brain development in particular addiction and other mental health disorders? Do the contextual factors work independently or are there interaction effects? Are the behavioral responses of children developing under stress in any way adaptive (in the sense of reproductive success), or are they not adaptive? Does a child who developed under stress pursue behaviors that create the same conditions for their own offspring?
Ziker and his colleague hypothesize that early childhood stress and adverse environmental conditions, present orientation and risk-seeking or attention-seeking behaviors will correlate with accelerated reproductive behavior.
Kristin Snopkowski in the Department of Anthropology is a co-investigator on the project. Ziker will be working with and hosted by Louise Barrett, professor of psychology and Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Cognition, Evolution, and Behaviour at the University of Lethbridge.
Ziker also will be conducting outreach with the Alberta Family Wellness Initiative. The Palix Foundation is a proactive private foundation that established the Alberta Family Wellness Initiative (AFWI) in 2007. AFWI aims to mobilize and connect synthesized scientific research about early brain and biological development (i.e. brain science) to better understand and address how intergenerational factors, as well as experiences in children’s lives as they grow and develop, impact their health and well-being throughout life, in particular on mental health and addiction. The first panel discussion and networking event with the three Fulbright-Palix Chairs will take place on Sept. 28.
BY: CIENNA MADRID PUBLISHED 3:12 PM / AUGUST 22, 2016