The study examines how physical punishment can impact neural systems to produce adverse effects

The study examines how physical punishment can impact neural systems to produce adverse effects

Don't spank your children. That's the conventional wisdom, emerging from decades of research that links corporal punishment to worsening adolescent health and negative behavioral effects, including an increased risk of anxiety and depression. Now a new study examines how physical punishment might impact neural systems to produce these adverse effects.

Corporal punishment can be simply defined as “intentional infliction of physical pain by any means for the purpose of punishment, correction, discipline, instruction, or any other reason.” This violence, particularly when inflicted by a parent, creates a complex emotional experience. The researchers, led by Kreshnik Burani, MS, and in collaboration with Greg Hajcak, PhD, at Florida State University, wanted to understand the neural basis of this experience and its downstream consequences.

The study appears in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, published by Elsevier.

Researchers conducted a longitudinal study of 149 boys and girls ages 11 to 14 from the Tallahassee, FL area. Participants performed a video game-like task and a monetary guessing game while undergoing continuously recorded electroencephalography, or EEG - a non-invasive technique for measuring brain wave activity from the scalp. From the EEG data, the researchers determined two values ​​for each participant - one reflecting their neural response to errors and the other reflecting their neural response to reward.

Two years later, participants and their parents completed a series of questionnaires to screen for anxiety and depression and assess parenting styles. As expected, children who experienced physical punishment were more likely to develop anxiety and depression.

Our work first replicates the well-known negative effect that corporal punishment has on a child's well-being: we found that corporal punishment is associated with increased anxiety and depressive symptoms in adolescence. However, our study goes further to show that physical punishment can influence brain activity and neurological development.”

Kreshnik Burani, MS, researcher, Florida State University

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This was reflected in a greater neural response to errors and a blunted response to reward in the adolescents who received physical punishment.

"In particular," Burani added, "our paper links physical punishment to increased neural sensitivity to errors and reduced neural sensitivity to rewards in adolescence. In previous and ongoing work with Dr. Hajcak, we see that increased neural response to errors is associated with anxiety and anxiety risk, while decreased neural response to rewards is associated with depression and depression risk. Physical punishment could therefore alter certain neural developmental pathways that increase risk for anxiety and depression by making children hypersensitive to their own mistakes and less reactive to rewards and other positive events in their environment.”

Cameron Carter, MD, editor of Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, said of the findings: "Using EEG, this study provides new insights into the mechanisms that may underlie the adverse effects of physical punishment on children's mental health, as well as the neural systems that may be affected."

The work provides new evidence about the neural basis of depression and anxiety and could help guide interventions for at-risk youth.

Source:

Elsevier

Reference:

Burani, K., et al. (2022) Physical punishment is clearly associated with a greater neural response to errors and a blunted neural response to rewards in adolescence. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging. doi.org/10.1016/j.bpsc.2022.09.004.

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