I wrote yesterday about having an emotional spring clean. I have written before about a great many ways to help do that, and all of these processes in these articles are going to help you wonderfully when it comes to having a good emotional and mental spring clean and letting go of what you no […]
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Researchers have discovered that an important learning process is impaired in adolescents who were abused as children. Experts believe this impairment contributes to misbehavior patterns later in life.
The theory holds that associative learning, or the process by which an individual subconsciously links experiences and stimuli together, partially explains how people generally react to various real-world situations.
In the new study, University of Pittsburgh Assistant Professor Jamie L. Hanson, detailed the connection between impaired associative learning capacities and instances of early childhood abuse.
“We primarily found that a poorer sense of associative learning negatively influences a child’s behavior patterns during complex and fast-changing situations.”
Having this knowledge is important for child psychologists, social workers, public policy officials and other professionals who are actively working to develop interventions,” said Hanson.
“We have long known that there is a link between behavioral issues in adolescents and various forms of early life adversities. Yet, the connection isn’t always clear or straightforward. This study provides further insight into one of the many factors of how this complicated relationship comes to exist.”
The study appears in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
To uncover the relationships between early childhood adversity and later behavior, researchers asked 81 adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 to play computer games where the child had to figure out which set of visual cues were associated with a reward.
Forty-one participants had endured physical abuse at a young age, while the remaining 40 served as a comparison group. The most important aspect of the test, said Hanson, was that the cues were probabilistic, meaning children did not always receive positive feedback.
“The participants who had been exposed to early childhood abuse were less able than their peers to correctly learn which stimuli were likely to result in reward, even after repeated feedback,” said Hanson.
“In life we are often given mixed or little to no feedback from our significant others, bosses, parents and other important people in our lives. We have to be able to figure out what might be the best thing to do next.”
Hanson and his colleagues also observed that mistreated children were generally less adept at differentiating which behaviors would lead to the best results for them personally when interacting with others.
Additionally, abused children displayed more pessimism about the likelihood of positive outcomes compared to the group who hadn’t been abused. Taken as a whole, these findings clarify the relationship between physical abuse and the aggressive and disruptive behaviors that often plague abused children well into the later stages of childhood.
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, also contributed to the study.
Source: University of Pittsburgh
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A new study finds that people with intermittent explosive disorder (IED) are at five times greater risk of abusing substances such as alcohol, tobacco and marijuana than those who don’t display frequent aggressive behavior.
IED is described as a condition marked by frequent physical or verbal outbursts.
Researchers from the University of Chicago analyzed data from more than 9,200 subjects in the National Comorbidity Survey, a national survey of mental health in the United States. They found that as the severity of aggressive behavior increased, so did levels of daily and weekly substance use.
The findings suggest that a history of frequent, aggressive behavior is a risk factor for later substance abuse, and effective treatment of aggression could delay or even prevent substance abuse in young people.
Emil Coccaro, M.D., led the study, which appears in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
The research is relevant as IED affects as many as 16 million Americans, more than bipolar disorder and schizophrenia combined. It is often first diagnosed in adolescents, some of whom are as young as 11, years before substance abuse problems usually develop.
IED runs in families and is thought to have a significant genetic component, although Coccaro said people tend to treat it as a social-behavioral issue instead of as a true neurobiological disorder.
“People don’t see this as a medical problem. They think of it as simply bad behavior they have developed over the course of their lives, but it isn’t. It has significant biology and neuroscience behind it,” said Coccaro.
Previous research has implied that aggressive behavior in IED is due to the presence of other psychiatric disorders, such as anxiety or depression. But the new UChicago study found no such relationship.
While substance abuse, like excessive drinking, can clearly make aggressive behavior worse, the onset of IED almost always precedes the development of chronic substance abuse.
Coccaro and his team found that IED preceded substance abuse in 92.5 percent of the cases where subjects developed both disorders.
Coccaro emphasized that early psychological intervention, medication and cognitive therapy are the most effective treatments to prevent, or at least delay, substance abuse problems in adolescents diagnosed with IED.
“What you’re really treating is the emotional dysregulation that leads to aggression,” Coccaro said.
“The earlier you treat this dysregulation, the more likely you are to offset other disorders that come later down the road.”
Source: University of Chicago/EurekAlert
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Dancing, fitness and hypnosis
Alexandria Echo Press Dancing, a fitness demonstration, hypnosis and lots of vendor exhibits added up to fun and excitement at the 23nd annual Echo Press Lifestyles Expo at the Viking Plaza Saturday, Feb. 25. More than 50 exhibitors were at the mall, showcasing their ... |
Human intelligence, even in its most basic forms, is expressed in our language, and is also partly dependent on our linguistic capacity. Homer, Darwin and Einstein could obviously not have achieved what they did without language—but neither could a child in kindergarten. And this raises an important question about animal intelligence. Although we don’t expect a chimpanzee to write an epic or a dolphin to develop a scientific theory, it has frequently been asked whether these or other animals are close in intelligence to children in young children. If so, we must wonder whether animals can acquire a language.
In the last half century, much effort has been put trying answer that question by teaching animals, primarily apes, a basic language. There have been some limited successes, with animals using signs to obtain things in which they were interested, for instance. But no animal has yet acquired the linguistic capability that children have already in their third year of life.
“Why?”
This is a question children start asking during by the age of three at the latest. No animal has yet asked anything. “Why?” is a very important question: it shows that those asking it are aware they don’t know something they wish to know. Understanding the why-question is also necessary for the ability to justify our actions and thoughts. The fact that animals don’t ask “why?” shows they don’t aspire to knowledge and are incapable of justification.
“No!”
Children start saying no before they are two years old. No animal has yet said no. In order to master basic logic, one must understand negation. The inability of animals to use negation shows they lack basic logical abilities.
If a person knows that either A or B, and later learns that A isn’t the case, he’ll infer that B holds. This is called a disjunctive syllogism or inference. Are animals capable of such an inference? In 2001 Watson, Gergely et al. published the results of the following study, conducted on dogs and on four- to six-year-old children (Journal of Comparative Psychology. The dogs and children were first shown a desirable object in a container; next, a person holding the container passed behind three screens; and then the container was shown to be empty. The dogs and children were then allowed to search for the object behind the screens.
While children tended to increase their speed of checking behind the third screen after failing to find the object behind the first two, dogs tended to significantly decrease their speed of checking behind the third screen after thus failing. We know that children of this age are capable of a disjunctive inference, and this explains their search pattern. The contrasting dogs’ search pattern is explained if the dogs did not think logically but were motivated by mere association, and then each failure to find the object amounted to an extinction trial for the association. ‘There is as yet no compelling evidence for successful logical reasoning using the disjunctive syllogism in nonhuman animals’ (Mody & Carey, Cognition 2016).
Another essential characteristic of our language is its normativity—namely, the fact that there are right and wrong uses of a word or phrase. We understand, for instance, that we used a certain word wrongly, or that we don’t yet know how to use it. Animals’ use of language does not have this aspect. An animal might use a sign the way we intended it to be used, or it might not yet use the sign that way. But the animal itself cannot understand that it doesn’t know how to use the sign or that it has used it incorrectly. Understanding the idea of a mistake or of normativity depends on the ability to understand that something is not right, and since animals cannot understand negation they cannot understand normativity.
Since normativity is essential to our language, animals don’t have a language in the sense we do. Animals produce sounds that express their emotions, and some can use signs in a Pavlovian way, as a result of an association between previous uses and succeeding events. But without “Why?” and “No!” there’s nothing resembling human language.
And the distinctions don’t stop there. To ascribe a mistake to another is to ascribe him a belief which is not true. Accordingly, the inability to understand negation makes animals incapable of understanding that someone has a false belief. Indeed, a study recently published in Science claimed apes can ascribe a mistake to others. But empirical issues, as well as faulty analysis of the findings (see my response in Science at make the study’s conclusions unsupported.
Some emotions also depend on the understanding of negation, possibility, and other logical concepts. For instance, you hope that something will happen if you want it to happen but understand that it might not happen. And since animals cannot understand the notions of negation or of possibility, they cannot hope. Your dog expects you to take it out for a walk when you take the leash off the hook, and that is why it gets excited. But when you take a nap it cannot hope that you will take it out once you get up.
Ethics involves normative concepts, of what is right, just or fair to do, and of their contraries. And since animals do not understand such concepts, they are incapable of anything like human moral behaviour or related feelings. For instance, if Alice clearly gave Bob more than she did Charlie, although it was equally clear that Bob did not deserve more, Charlie will get upset: it’s not fair! Such moral emotions, the result of injustice or lack of equity, are beyond the purview of animals.
Several studies have been conducted in order to show that animals do have such emotions, the best known probably being that of Frans de Waal and his colleagues with capuchin monkeys. One monkey gets furious when it continues to receive cucumbers after it sees the other monkey receiving grapes for the same task. However, the monkey gets upset not because it thinks it was treated unjustly, but because it expects grapes and receives cucumbers. The monkey doesn’t initially get upset when it sees the other receiving a grape after it received a cucumber; Charlie, by contrast, will remonstrate when he sees Alice giving Bob more than she earlier gave him. Rather, the monkey gets upset only later, when it doesn’t receive what it expects. It cries in frustration, not with moral indignation.
We shouldn’t immediately interpret behaviour that with us would be the result of a specific feeling or belief as resulting, in similar circumstances, from the same feeling or belief in animals. We should rather first examine the animals in other circumstances as well, to determine the limits of their capacities.
Animals can suffer, enjoy, be angry, surprised or afraid. Some are also sad when they lose their young. These and similar feelings bring us to love them, pity them and try to prevent them from suffering. But their resemblance to humans stops there. Human beings, as Aristotle observed and Descartes reiterated, are animals with a language. And language here is also logos, that is, logic or rationality. And experience teaches us that these are absent from the rest of the animal kingdom.
