Corporal Punishment Changes Brain Activity, Increases Anxiety and Depression
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It is generally advised not to spank children due to the negative consequences that have been linked to corporal punishment in decades of research.
These consequences include a decline in adolescent health and negative impacts on behavior, such as an increased risk for anxiety and depression. A recent study has examined how corporal punishment may affect neural systems and lead to these adverse effects.
Corporal punishment involves intentionally causing physical pain for the purposes of punishment, correction, discipline, instruction, or any other reason. This type of violence, particularly when inflicted by a parent, can elicit a complex emotional response. Researchers at Florida State University, led by Kreshnik Burani and Greg Hajcak, sought to understand the neural processes underlying this emotional experience and its resulting consequences.
The study was published in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.
The researchers conducted a longitudinal study on 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 noninvasive technique to measure brain-wave activity from the scalp.
From the
EEG data, the researchers determined two scores for each participant – one
reflecting their neural response to error 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 to assess parenting style. As expected, kids who had experienced corporal punishment were more likely to develop anxiety and depression.
“Our paper first replicates the well-known negative effect that corporal punishment has on a child’s wellbeing: we found that corporal punishment is associated with increased anxiety and depressive symptoms in adolescence. However, our study goes further to demonstrate that corporal punishment might impact brain activity and neurodevelopment,” said Burani.
That was reflected by larger neural
response to error and a blunted response to reward in the adolescents who
received physical punishments.
“Specifically,” Burani added, “our paper
links corporal punishment to increased neural sensitivity to making errors and
decreased neural sensitivity to receiving rewards in adolescence. In previous
and ongoing work with Dr. Hajcak, we see that increased neural response to
errors is associated with anxiety and risk for anxiety, whereas decreased
neural response to rewards is related to depression and risk for depression.
Corporal punishment, therefore, might alter specific neurodevelopmental
pathways that increase the 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 corporal punishment on mental health in children as well as the neural systems that may be affected.”
The work provides new clues as to the neural underpinnings
of depression and anxiety and could help guide interventions for at-risk youth.
Reference:
“Corporal Punishment Is Uniquely Associated With a Greater Neural Response to
Errors and Blunted Neural Response to Rewards in Adolescence” by Kreshnik
Burani, C. J. Brush, Chandler Spahr, George M. Slavich, Alexandria Meyer and
Greg Hajcak, 21 September 2022, Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.
DOI: 10.1016/j.bpsc.2022.09.004