How Immature Parents Stunt their Children's Growth

This is blog topic found at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-12-high-stress-childhoods-adults-potential-loss.html

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Adults who lived high-stress childhoods have  trouble reading the signs that a loss or punishment is looming, leaving  themselves in situations that risk avoidable health and financial  problems and legal trouble.                                 

According to  researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, this difficulty may  be biological, stemming from an unhelpful lack of activity in the brain  when a situation should be prompting heightened awareness. And that  discovery may help train at-risk young people to be better at avoiding  risk. 

"It's not that people are overtly deciding to take these negative  risks, or do things that might get them in trouble," says Seth Pollak, a  UW-Madison psychology professor who has studied kids and stress  for decades. "It may very well be that their brains are not really  processing the information that should tell them they are headed to a  bad place, that this is not the right step to take." 

Pollak and UW-Madison psychiatry Professor Rasmus Birn brought back  to the lab more than 50 people—now ages 20 to 23—who were participants  in a study Pollak conducted about stress hormones when they were 8 years  old. They were drawn equally from that study's least-stressed and  most-stressed kids. 

Those who dealt with chronic high stress as children  experienced traumatic events like parents killed by gunfire or  substance abuse, multiple foster home placements and severe  maltreatment, according to Pollak. The researchers put the adults through a series of tasks—while in and  out of brain-scanning functional magnetic resonance imagers  (fMRI)—designed to stimulate the brain regions that weigh gain and loss,  risk and reward. 

The high childhood stress group was less attentive to potential loss than the low childhood stress group, and more piqued by resulting losses. The results were published today (Dec. 4, 2017) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Among the most striking outcomes, Birn says, was watching the  high-stress group work through a gambling scenario in which a token is  hidden behind one of 10 squares. Some of the squares are colored red,  others blue. The object is to choose the color of the square covering  the token. 

 "Most people if you see nine red squares, one blue square—and the  token is randomly placed—you're going to guess red," he says. "And yet,  in a lot of these individuals who experienced high childhood stress we  saw, they're betting on the one instead of the nine. And they're betting  against the odds again and again." And they spent longer doing it, according to Pollak, agonizing over the decision before making a poor decision again. "It was our observation not that they couldn't do math, but that they  weren't really attending to the right things," he says. "We didn't see  people improving over time. You might say, 'Well, they don't get how it  works.' But the people with high-stress childhoods, even after many  trials, they weren't using negative feedback to change their behavior  and improve." 

In brain scans from the people who lived with high stress as  children, Birn and Pollak could see a surprisingly low amount of  activity in the brain region expected to light up when confronted by a  potential loss. "And then, when they would lose, we'd see more activity than  expected—an overreaction—in the part of the brain that responds to  reward," Pollak says, "which makes sense. 

If you didn't catch the cue  that you were likely to lose, you're probably going to be pretty shocked  when you don't win." The high-stress childhood group also reported undertaking more risky  behaviors—smoking, not wearing a seatbelt in a car or texting while  driving—on a regular basis than their low-stress counterparts. 

Interestingly, it was just the childhood stress level—not the level  of stress in the participants' adult lives—that was predictive of their  ability to identify potential loss or avoid risky behavior. The researchers' knowledge of their subjects' childhood stress is  unique. 

Typically, assessing the childhood of a group of adults requires  relying on their recollections and spotty records. "But we knew these people when they were kids," says Pollak. "We have  a clinical assessment of their stress levels in childhood that was done  at that time of their lives, while their parents sat in the waiting  room. That's powerful data." 

The results are powerful, too, and have already drawn interest from  child welfare authorities and family court judges often in the position  of trying to change behavior by threatening or applying punishment. "So many of our behavioral interventions are predicated on the idea  that people will understand there's a sign they're about to be  punished," Pollak says. "Maybe we need to rethink some of those things." And maybe people can be taught to spot potential loss and risk.  

Understanding the brain mechanisms that contribute to repeated poor  judgment could illuminate ways to prevent it. "What are they paying attention to? What associations from past  experience are they able to remember and connect? Can we help them make  better observations and predictions?" Pollak says. "Framing behavioral  problems as a learning problem opens up new doors of what we can do to  help people." 

Next, the researchers plan to expand the scope of their brain scans and analyses. "Now that we have this finding, we can use it to guide us to look at  specific networks in the brain that are active and functionally  connected," Birn says. "We may find that childhood stress reshapes the  way communication happens across the brain."                                                                   

Explore further: Harmful effects of stress on the brain and promising approaches for relief   

More information: asmus M. Birn el al., "Early  childhood stress exposure, reward pathways, and adult decision making," PNAS (2017). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1708791114
  

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences     Provided by: University of Wisconsin-Madison