Violence, the brain and child abuse: Anterior cingulate development and control of violence impulses in abused children
Why does abuse form a chain?
It pains me to see news reports about child abuse that come on at times, but volumes of research show that many parents who abuse children were themselves abused when they were young, or in other words, abuse continues in a chain from generation to generation.
But how can this chain of abuse be explained in physiological terms?
The paper I discuss today investigates the relationship between abuse suffered as a child and the development of the brain region called the anterior cingulate, which plays a major role in emotional control.
Humans are frequently called creatures of logic and emotion, but the anterior cingulate is located in the brain at a place that connects emotion and logic, and because of this it has significant involvement in the decision on logical control and logical determination
This research investigated the participants’ history of violence, their history of abuse suffered when young, and the size of their anterior cingulate, and the results show that the more violence a person suffers as a child, the more their anterior cingulate shrinks and the more their violent acts occur.
I wondered whether the chain of violence also affects acquired changes to the brain’s development.
Every time I see the parents’ faces in news reports about abuse, I think, “They probably used to be a little girl or boy who was abused and cried like that too.”
Lately, I have been reading Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov when I have time. We carefully avert our eyes while we live our lives, but I sometimes feel that living as a person is fundamentally suffering.
I wonder whether balancing the sociality people are born with, that is, love and violence and a little madness, is the task of our lives.
