How Poverty Changes the Brain

Elisabeth Babcock, Ph.D. is the President and CEO of Economic Mobility Pathways (EMPath), a national charitable organization dedicated to creating new pathways to economic independence for low-income women and their families. Beth’s role as CEO is to lead EMPath in its strategy to be a research and innovations powerhouse consistently delivering new approaches that expedite pathways out of poverty. A new study by EMPath examines how poverty really affects the brain. People in poverty tend to get stuck in vicious cycles where stress leads to bad decision-making, compounding other problems and reinforcing the idea that they can’t improve their own lives. Elizabeth Babcock explains the research.