Brain Scans Show the Impact of Neglect on a Child's Brain Size

This is not new information - infants have been known to die as a result of no touch or affection, a phenomena first studied in orphanages following World War II, and codified by John Bowbly by request of the U.N. Bowlby's work paralleled that of his contemporary, René Spitz, who observed children's grief at being separated from caregivers, and he proposed "that "psychotoxic" results were brought about by inappropriate experiences of early care.[67][68]"

However, to see the actual brain scans of nurtured children versus those subjected to neglect is startling and, as the headline suggests, chilling.

Chilling Brain Scans Show the Impact of a Mother's Love on a Child's Brain Size

A shocking comparison of brain scans from two three-year-old children reveals new evidence of the remarkable impact a mother's love has on a child's brain development.

BY CHRISTINE HSU | OCT 29, 2012

(Photo : Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D./Child Trauma Academy) Neurologists say that the sizeable difference between these two brains of two different 3-year-olds has one primary cause: the way that their mothers treated them.

The chilling images reveal that the left brain, which belongs to a normal 3-year-old, is significantly larger and contains fewer spots and dark "fuzzy" areas than the right brain, which belongs to that of a 3-year-old who has suffered extreme neglect.

Neurologists say that the latest images provide more evidence that the way children are treated in their early years is important not only for the child's emotional development, but also in determining the size of their brains.

Experts say that the sizeable difference in the two brains is primarily caused by the difference in the way each child was treated by their mothers.

While at first glance, the images might indicate that the child with the right brain might have suffered a serious accident or illness, neurologists said that the truth is that the child with the shrunken brain was neglected and abused by its mother, and the child with the larger and more fully developed brain was raised in a loving, supportive home and was looked after by its mother, according to The Sunday Telegraph.

Researchers told the UK newspaper that the image of the brain scan on the right shows that the child lacks some of the most fundamental areas that are present in the image of the brain scan on the left.

They say that the child on the left with the larger brain will be more intelligent and will be more likely to develop the social ability to empathize with others compared to the child on the right.

On the other hand, the child with the smaller brain on the right will be more likely to become addicted to drugs, be involved in violent crimes, be unemployed and dependent on government benefits in the future.

Furthermore, the child with the shrunken brain is significantly more likely to develop mental and other serious health-related problems.

Professor Allan Schore from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) said that in the first two years, babies rely on a strong bond with their mothers for healthy brain development.

"The development of cerebral circuits depends on it," he said, adding that because 80 percent of brain cells grow in the first two years of life, problems in that development can affect people for the rest of their lives.

Furthermore, researchers said that the more severe the mother's neglect, the more pronounced the brain damage can be.

Researchers said the process of childhood neglect is a vicious cycle because the parents of neglected children were also neglected by their parents and do not have fully developed brain.

However, past research has shown that the cycle can be broken if there is early intervention and families are supported.

The latest study supports research released earlier this year that showed that children brought up by mothers who provide love and affection early in life are smarter and have a greater capacity to learn.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, found that children whose mothers nurtured them early in life have a larger hippocampus, a key brain structure that is essential to learning, memory and response to stress, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.

Allan Schore - Human Nature and Early Experience & "The Neurobiology of a Secure Attachment"

Allan Schore is the leading figure in the neurobiology of attachment and the neuroscience of affect regulation. He, along with Dan Siegel and some others, co-founded the field of interpersonal neurobiology.

I'm am thrilled to have found a full-length lecture from him for attachment theory day here at IOC. However, my experience of him is that he is brilliant, but his talks are dry.

His major books are Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self/Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self (two-volume set), and his new book, The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy, which I just received today and look forward to reading.

First up a short video on neuroscience and secure attachment.

The Neurobiology of a Secure Attachment

And here is the main attraction, a full-length lecture from Dr. Schore.

Human Nature and Early Experience

Bowlby's 'Environment of evolutionary adaptedness' - Recent studies on the interpersonal neurobiology of attachment and emotional development.

Contextualizing Attachment Theory and Practice & Understanding Great Leadership Using the Filter of Secure Attachment

It's attachment theory day at IOC. Just because. Both of these videos were offered by Genetic Alliance as a two-part webinar on attachment theory and practice.

There will be more to come later today.

Contextualizing Attachment Theory and Practice

This program is the first of two webinars focusing on attachment theory and practice. It will give an overview with special attention to the potential uses of attachment theory for parents and family members in the advocacy community. Annmarie Early's experience as a professor and couples' therapist combines theory and practice with numerous stories of the application of attachment theory.

Understanding Great Leadership Using the Filter of Secure Attachment

This program, the second of two on attachment theory and practice, will focus on the Genetic Alliance leadership model developed over the last eight years with specific attention to attachment theory. Organizational transformation begins with ourselves as leaders and the energy, creativity, and productivity of our organization is a direct function of our leadership. Attachment theory gives a simple, clear, and direct framework for understanding the value of a leader's accessibility, responsiveness, and emotional engagement—all essential expressions of a secure attachment identity.

Research: Oxytocin and mutual communication in mother-infant bonding

Attachment theory has become one of the dominant models for understanding the etiology of mental illness. More and more, we are finding that the caregiver-infant bond is crucial in the later mental health of the child. There are many factors that influence this bonding, including the attachment wounds of the caregiver, environment, genetics, and a host of other factors, including the biology of child and caregiver.

One of the primary biological factors (which also is determined by many other variables) is oxytocin. This new study looks at the role of oxytocin in bonding, which we know to be crucial while not yet understanding the mechanisms involved.

The article is open access, from Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

Oxytocin and mutual communication in mother-infant bonding

Miho Nagasawa, Shota Okabe, Kazutaka Mogi and Takefumi Kikusui*

• Department of Animal Science and Biotechnology, Azabu University, Sagamihara, Kanagawa-ken, Japan

Mother-infant bonding is universal to all mammalian species. In this review, we describe the manner in which reciprocal communication between the mother and infant leads to mother-infant bonding in rodents. In rats and mice, mother-infant bond formation is reinforced by various social stimuli, such as tactile stimuli and ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) from the pups to the mother, and feeding and tactile stimulation from the mother to the pups. Some evidence suggests that mother and infant can develop a cross-modal sensory recognition of their counterpart during this bonding process. Neurochemically, oxytocin in the neural system plays a pivotal role in each side of the mother-infant bonding process, although the mechanisms underlying bond formation in the brains of infants has not yet been clarified. Impairment of mother-infant bonding, that is, deprivation of social stimuli from the mother, strongly influences offspring sociality, including maternal behavior toward their own offspring in their adulthood, implying a “non-genomic transmission of maternal environment,” even in rodents. The comparative understanding of cognitive functions between mother and infants, and the biological mechanisms involved in mother-infant bonding may help us understand psychiatric disorders associated with mother-infant relationships.

Citation: Nagasawa M, Okabe S, Mogi K and Kikusui T. (2012). Oxytocin and mutual communication in mother-infant bonding. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6: 31. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00031

I am including the introduction to entice you to go read the whole article.

Introduction

“Sympathy is much strengthened by habit. In however complex a manner this feeling may have originated, as it is one of high importance to all those animals which aid and defend one another, it will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring” (Charles Darwin, “Descent of Man,” 1871).

During the process of mammalian evolution, animals developed sympathetic neural and behavioral systems, in which for example, weak and helpless member of individuals are protected and nurtured by other group members. This phenomenon is mostly clearly observed in mother-infant relationship, such as mother infant bonding (Broad et al., 2006).

Social bonds like mother-infant bonding are hypothetical constructs and cannot be measured directly. However, there are several behavioral and physiological measures that have been used as indices of social bonding, including increased physical proximity (Hennessy, 1997), behavioral distress, or elevated corticosteroid levels following separation from the bonding partner (Ziegler et al., 1995; Norcross and Newman, 1999). Social bonding has not yet been clearly defined, but it has been proposed that social bonding can be distinguished neurochemically from social affiliation, in which corticosteroid elevation does not occur following separation (DeVries, 2002). Moreover, subsequent reunion with conspecific animals ameliorates separation distress or aversive experiences. This phenomenon is termed as “social buffering” (Kikusui et al., 2006); its effect depends on the degree of affiliation with the partner and is strongest with the bonding partner, such as that seen in the dyad of mother-infant.

Mother-infant bonding is unique with respect to its influence on the offspring's future. This idea was first suggested in humans by Bowlby's attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969). Subsequently, many psychological and animal research studies have reported that child abuse or childhood neglect are correlated with severe, deleterious long-term effects on the child's cognitive, socio-emotional, and behavioral development (Hildyard and Wolfe, 2002). The developmental effects of mother-infant bonding have also been indicated experimentally in non-human primates. For example, in a study by Winslow et al. (2003), mother-reared and human nursery-reared monkeys were subjected to a novel environment with or without a cage mate. The monkeys reared by their mothers exhibited a reduced cortisol response when a social partner was available, whereas nursery-reared monkeys did not. In nursery-reared monkeys, social contact, such as allogrooming and inter-male mounting, was drastically reduced. These findings suggest that the social buffering effect is impaired as nursery-reared monkeys had experienced less social contact in a novel environment. Thus, impairment of mother-infant bonding strongly influences offspring sociality in human and non-human primates (Agid et al., 1999; Heim and Nemeroff, 2001), although details of the underlying mechanisms are not yet fully understood. Additionally, because the bonding formation is established during the process of social communication between mother and infants, social cognition has a pivotal influence on the bonding process (Ross and Young, 2009). However, little information has been obtained regarding the role of each social cue in the formation of bonds.

In the present review, we describe the manner in which mutual communication between mother and infant leads to mother-infant bonding in rodents. We emphasize the significance of the conserved oxytocin neural system in mother-infant bond information, with several studies having shown that oxytocin plays a fundamental role in establishing this bond (Kendrick, 2000; Young et al., 2001; Wang and Aragona, 2004; Young and Wang, 2004). Other neurotransmitters that regulated social bonding, such as opioids and dopamine are also important, however, we would concede these issues in other articles. We also review the effects of deprivation of mother-infant bonding, by studying the consequences of early weaning on neurobehavioral development in rodent offspring. Intensive maternal care has evolved and has been preserved, uniquely in mammals, and it is highly probable that mother-infant bonding is universal to all mammalian species. These comparative points of view provide insights into the biological significance of mother-infant bonding in mammals; a comparative understanding of the developmental consequences of this bonding and its underlying mechanisms, even in rodents, may help in our treatment or prevention of disorders associated with child abuse or childhood neglect (Agid et al., 1999; Heim and Nemeroff, 2001).