& # 8217 ; Brains Essay, Research Paper

Maltreatment Can Rewire Kids? Brains

This article discusses the damaging effects that maltreatment can hold on a kid? s neurological activity. Childs who are abused physically and psychologically demo fierce neural excitement when detecting images of angry faces. Children who are non victims of maltreatment do non see such hideous degrees of neurological rousing when shown images of angry faces. Research conducted at the Child Emotion Research Laboratory suggests that the encephalons of abused are wired otherwise from those of childs who were non abused. Possibly this is because the abused kid develops a more acute set of survival accomplishments. The encephalon is merely accommodating ( or more accurately, mal-adapting ) to the kid? s environment. If the kid is invariably being abused the encephalon is traveling to accommodate itself to the maltreaters emotional forms in order to keep the kid? s good being. The encephalon becomes extremist sensitive to the maltreater? s facial looks to alarm the kid when danger is near. Harmonizing to the article, nevertheless, this increased activity can hold negative effects on the abused kid? s development. The kid becomes so allergic to anger, which may do he or she to comprehend choler when it does non really exist. The inquiry that comes to my head is this: Are playground toughs on bull

ies because they falsely perceive anger or some other threatening emotion simply because of at home abuse? I believe this article is trying to demonstrate that the environment plays a primary role in our brains overall development and functioning. Interestingly enough, when abused and non-abused children are shown fearful and happy faces their brain wave responses were quite similar. Only when the children were shown angry faces did the abused children have dramatically greater and longer lasting brain wave arousal. It makes sense that abused children have higher levels of brain stimulation when viewing angry face because that is what is ?normal? to them. I would think that these children would experience lower levels of arousal when viewing a happy face especially if happy expressions in the home are few and far between. The article also points out that the endocrine suffers more in maltreated children. Hormonal differences, such as cortisol have been found to be higher at certain times of the day in abused children as compared to non-abused children. It seems obvious that this hyperactivity occurring in abused children?s brain could lead to very serious emotional disorders and possibly even death. We must look on the positive side and hope that future research will be better able to understand why these biological changes occur in abused children.