FREE ESSAY ON ABUSE CAN REWIRE KIDS' BRAINS

ABUSE CAN REWIRE KIDS' BRAINS

Abuse Can Rewire Kids' Brains
This article discusses the detrimental effects that abuse can have on a child's
neurological activity. Children who are abused physically and psychologically show
vehement neuronal excitation when observing pictures of angry faces. Children who are not
victims of abuse do not experience such outrageous levels of neurological arousal when
shown pictures of angry faces. Research conducted at the Child Emotion Research
Laboratory suggests that the brains of abused are wired differently from those of kids
who were not abused. Perhaps this is because the abused child develops a more acute set
of survival skills. The brain is simply adapting (or more accurately, mal-adapting) to
the child's environment. If the child is constantly being abused the brain is going to
adapt itself to the abusers emotional patterns in order to maintain the child's well
being. The brain becomes ultra sensitive to the abuser's facial expressions to alert the
child when danger is near. According to the article, however, this increased activity can
have negative effects on the abused child's development. The child becomes so sensitized
to anger, which may cause he or she to perceive anger when it does not actually exist.
The question that comes to my mind is this: Are playground bullies on bullies 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.