Adapted is not impaired: identifying and leveraging stress-adapted skills among children and adolescents in a Brazilian favela

The prevailing view in psychology and other social sciences is that exposure to high-stress ontogenetic environments inhibits neurocognitive development; stress-exposed children exhibit various deficits compared to their safely nurtured peers. Recent work in the developmental sciences argues that the deficit model represents only part of the story. Natural selection has in fact shaped humans to be sensitive to the surrounding environment particularly during childhood, so as to create adaptive strategies that increase their inclusive fitness. Despite the potential of this evolutionary reframing of development in terms of adaptive plasticity for theory-driven research and evidence-based intervention and policy, the knowledge in this field remains inchoate, due to the dearth of empirical studies. My research aims to fill this empirical lacuna through an investigation of the adaptation strategies expressed among the children who grow up in a highly stressful environment.