Parental care of rodents is not the same as socioeconomic status in humans.
The question of socioeconomic status in scientific research is an interesting one. Many experiments do not take socioeconomic status into account, yet studies show that socioeconomic status can significantly alter the human brain. The article, “Socioeconomic status and the brain: mechanistic insights from human and animal research” addresses some of these issues. However, one of the main problems I noticed with this article is the equivalence of socioeconomic status with quality of parental care. The article seems to associate lower socioeconomic status with parental neglect. Conversely, higher socioeconomic status is associated with higher quality parental care. While there may in fact be a correlation, status is by no means a perfect predictor of parental quality. Parental care in rats ( source ) One of the studies cited in the article uses lack of grooming in rats as a model for low socioeconomic status based on the idea that parental care is equated to status. However, this model s...