Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
tal that provides support, although these may be considered as part of an area's
infrastructure. Added to such problems from these essentially empirical character-
istics, are those that come from the
affective dimensions
, which deal with attitudes
and feelings. Areas of high crime with social and health disadvantages have at least
10 types of negative attitudinal characteristics that can negatively affect well-being.
These were labelled as areas or 'terrains' of: social inadequacy; despair and limited
goals; exclusion and discrimination; acceptance of decay and destruction; anxiety
and fear; spontaneity of actions and emotions; indifference to others; low restraint
and self-control; anti-social attitudes; and peer group (gang) allegiance (Davies
2004
). All these attitudes reduce the well-being and the health of people in areas
where these attitudes are found, and needed to be countered if progress is to be
made in improving the lives of people affected by such features.
Many social commentators, from those of the nineteenth century to the present,
have suggested that being poor and stressed seems to literally make one sick. In ad-
dition, the effects of poverty, stress, exposure to violence, poor nutrition and limited
affection is also known to lead to far lower acquisitions of early language skills
in children and hence subsequent intellectual progress. Also, Fonagy (
2003
) has
argued that the usual socialization of young children 'out of aggression' that occurs
in nurturing parenting is limited in disadvantaged areas, producing a rapid and irra-
tional response to perceived threats. This type of primitive, unconscious reaction to
stimuli based on previous experiences, bypassing any rational evaluation, has been
identified by the cognitive psychologist Aaron Beck (
1999
) as the main basis of an
inadequate control of emotions, which leads people to violence in subsequent life.
Increasingly, it is recognized that these health and behavioural associations are not
a matter of life-styles choices, although they may contribute to the situation. What
amounts to a biological embedding of the effects of the early environment occurs
through epigenetic processes that affect the influence of genes, while it was ear-
lier observed (Sect. 13.2.2.8) that recent research is showing a strong relationships
between vitamin D deficiency in pregnant mothers and increasing rates of autoim-
mune diseases in their offspring.
Stimulated by the work of Professor Elizabeth Blackburn who was awarded a
Nobel prize in 2009 for her work on the way that the social environment has embed-
ded biological effects, the mechanisms of these connections are now being explored
in more detail, as seen in a special issue of Proceedings of the American Academy of
Sciences (Boyce et al.
2012
) and in a topic edited by Tollefsbol (
2014
) that reviews
transgenerational epigenesis effects. One of the ways in which this environmental-
embodiment relationship occurs is by the shortening of telomeres, which are rather
like a cap on the end of chromosomes that protects the DNA during replication
(Epel et al.
2004
). This reduction is associated with higher levels of ill-health and
predisposition to many diseases in later life. A recent pioneering study of 9 year old
Afro-American children who had suffered chronic stress from their upbringing in
poverty, unstable families and who were subject to harsh parenting and maternal de-
pression, revealed a shortening of their telomeres compared to children from more
affluent and nurturing backgrounds (Mitchell et al.
2014
). So these disadvantaged
children are likely to experience what amounts to premature aging and morbidity
