World's largest childhood trauma study uncovers brain rewiring

The world's largest brain study of childhood trauma has revealed how it affects development and rewires vital pathways.

The University of Essex study -- led by the Department of Psychology's Dr Megan Klabunde -- uncovered a disruption in neural networks involved in self-focus and problem-solving.

This means under-18s who experienced abuse will likely struggle with emotions, empathy and understanding their bodies.

Difficulties in school caused by memory, hard mental tasks and decision making may also emerge.

Dr Klabunde's cutting-edge research used AI to re-examine hundreds of brain scans and identify patterns.

It is hoped the research will help hone new treatments for children who have endured mistreatment.

This could mean therapists focus on techniques that rewire these centres and rebuild their sense of self.

Dr Klabunde said: "Currently, science-based treatments for childhood trauma primarily focus on addressing the fearful thoughts and avoidance of trauma triggers.

"This is a very important part of trauma treatment. However, our study has revealed that we are only treating one part of the problem.

"Even when a child who has experienced trauma is not thinking about their traumatic experiences, their brains are struggling to process their sensations within their bodies.

"This influences how one thinks and feels about one's 'internal world' and this also influences one's ability to empathise and form relationships."

Dr Klabunde reviewed 14 studies involving more than 580 children for the research published in Biological Psychiatry Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.

The paper re-examined functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans.

This procedure highlights blood flow in different centres, showing neurological activity.

The study discovered a marked difference in traumatised children's default mode (DMN) and central executive networks (CEN) -- two large scale brain systems.

The DMN and the posterior insula are involved in how people sense their body, the sense of self and their internal reflections.

New studies are finding the DMN plays an important role in most mental health problems -- and may be influenced by experiencing childhood trauma.

The CEN is also more active than in healthy children, which means that children with trauma histories tend to ruminate and relive terrible experiences when triggered.

Dr Klabunde hopes this study will be a springboard to find out more about how trauma affects developing minds.

She said: "Our brain findings indicate that childhood trauma treatments appear to be missing an important piece of the puzzle.

"In addition to preventing avoidance of scary situations and addressing one's thoughts, trauma therapies in children should also address how trauma's impacts on one's body, sense of self, emotional/empathetic processing, and relationships.

"This is important to do so since untreated symptoms will likely contribute to other health and mental health problems throughout the lifespan."

Read more at Science Daily

Psychopathic individuals are more likely to have larger striatum region in the brain

Neuroscientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), University of Pennsylvania, and California State University, have established the existence of a biological difference between psychopaths and non-psychopaths.

Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, they found that a region of the forebrain known as the striatum, was on average ten per cent larger in psychopathic individuals compared to a control group of individuals that had low or no psychopathic traits.

Psychopaths, or those with psychopathic traits, are generally defined as individuals that have an egocentric and antisocial personality. This is normally marked by a lack of remorse for their actions, a lack of empathy for others, and often criminal tendencies.

The striatum, which is a part of the forebrain, the subcortical region of the brain that contains the entire cerebrum, coordinates multiple aspects of cognition, including both motor and action planning, decision-making, motivation, reinforcement, and reward perception.

Previous studies have pointed to an overly active striatum in psychopaths but have not conclusively determined the impact of its size on behaviours. The new study reveals a significant biological difference between people who have psychopathic traits and those who do not.

While not all individuals with psychopathic traits end up breaking the law, and not all criminals meet the criteria for psychopathy, there is a marked correlation. There is clear evidence that psychopathy is linked to more violent behaviour.

The understanding of the role of biology in antisocial and criminal behaviour may help improve existing theories of behaviour, as well as inform policy and treatment options.

To conduct their study, the neuroscientists scanned the brains of 120 participants in the United States and interviewed them using the Psychopathy Checklist -- Revised, a psychological assessment tool to determine the presence of psychopathic traits in individuals.

Assistant Professor Olivia Choy, from NTU's School of Social Sciences, a neurocriminologistwho co-authored the study, said: "Our study's results help advance our knowledge about what underlies antisocial behaviour such as psychopathy. We find that in addition to social environmental influences, it is important to consider that there can be differences in biology, in this case, the size of brain structures, between antisocial and non-antisocial individuals."

Professor Adrian Raine from the Departments of Criminology, Psychiatry, and Psychology at University of Pennsylvania, who co-authored the study, said: "Because biological traits, such as the size of one's striatum, can be inherited to child from parent, these findings give added support to neurodevelopmental perspectives of psychopathy -- that the brains of these offenders do not develop normally throughout childhood and adolescence."

Professor Robert Schug from the School of Criminology, Criminal Justice, and Emergency Management at California State University, Long Beach, who co-authored the study, said: "The use of the Psychopathy Checklist -- Revised in a community sample remains a novel scientific approach: Helping us understand psychopathic traits in individuals who are not in jails and prisons, but rather in those who walk among us each day."

Highlighting the significance of the work done by the joint research team, Associate Professor Andrea Glenn from the Department of Psychology of The University of Alabama, who is not involved in the research, said: "By replicating and extending prior work, this study increases our confidence that psychopathy is associated with structural differences in the striatum, a brain region that is important in a variety of processes important for cognitive and social functioning. Future studies will be needed to understand the factors that may contribute to these structural differences."

The results of the study were published recently in the peer-reviewed academic publication Journal of Psychiatric Research.

Bigger striatum, larger appetite for stimulation

Through analyses of the MRI scans and results from the interviews to screen for psychopathy, the researchers linked having a larger striatum to an increased need for stimulation, through thrills and excitement, and a higher likelihood of impulsive behaviours.

The striatum is part of the basal ganglia, which is made up of clusters of neurons deep in the centre of the brain. The basal ganglia receive signals from the cerebral cortex, which controls cognition, social behaviour, and discerning which sensory information warrants attention.

In the past two decades, however, the understanding of the striatum has expanded, yielding hints that the region is linked to difficulties in social behaviour.

Previous studies have not addressed whether striatal enlargement is observed in adult females with psychopathic traits.

The neuroscientists say that within their study of 120 individuals, they examined 12 females and observed, for the first time, that psychopathy was linked to an enlarged striatum in females, just as in males. In human development, the striatum typically becomes smaller as a child matures, suggesting that psychopathy could be related to differences in how the brain develops.

Asst Prof Choy added: "A better understanding of the striatum's development is still needed. Many factors are likely involved in why one individual is more likely to have psychopathic traits than another individual. Psychopathy can be linked to a structural abnormality in the brain that may be developmental in nature. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that the environment can also have effects on the structure of the striatum."

Prof Raine added: "We have always known that psychopaths go to extreme lengths to seek out rewards, including criminal activities that involve property, sex, and drugs. We are now finding out a neurobiological underpinning of this impulsive and stimulating behaviour in the form of enlargement to the striatum, a key brain area involved in rewards.

Read more at Science Daily

Are people more willing to empathize with animals or with other humans?

Stories about animals such as Harambe the gorilla and Cecil the lion often sweep the media as they pull at people's heartstrings. But are people more likely to feel empathy for animals than humans?

A new Penn State study led by Daryl Cameron, associate professor of psychology and senior research associate at Rock Ethics Institute, found that the answer is complicated. The findings could have implications for how messaging to the public about issues like new environmental policies is framed, among others.

The researchers found that when people were asked to choose between empathizing with a human stranger or an animal -- in this study, a koala bear -- the participants were more likely to choose empathizing with a fellow human.

However, in a second pair of studies, the researchers had participants take part in two separate tasks: one in which they could choose whether or not they wanted to empathize with a person, and one in which they could choose whether or not they wanted to empathize with an animal. This time, people were more likely to choose empathy when faced with an animal than when faced with a person.

Cameron said the findings -- recently published in a special issue on empathy in the Journal of Social Psychology -- suggest that when people are deciding whether to engage in empathy, context matters.

"It's possible that if people are seeing humans and animals in competition, it might lead to them preferring to empathize with other humans," Cameron said. "But if you don't see that competition, and the situation is just deciding whether to empathize with an animal one day and a human the other, it seems that people don't want to engage in human empathy but they're a little bit more interested in animals."

According to the researchers, empathy is the process of thinking about another living thing's suffering and experiences as if they were their own. For example, not just having compassion for someone who is sad after an argument with a friend, but actually imagining and sharing in what that person is feeling.

While there are plenty of examples of people feeling empathy and compassion for animals, Cameron said there is also a theory that it may be more difficult for people to feel true empathy for animals since their minds are different than those of humans.

In the first study, the researchers recruited 193 people to participate in an experiment in which they were asked to make a series of choices between empathizing with a human or an animal. If they chose a human, they were shown a photo of a college-aged adult and asked to mentally share their experience. If they chose an animal, they were shown a photo of a koala and asked to do the same. The experiment was based on a novel empathy selection task developed in Cameron's Empathy and Moral Psychology Lab.

Cameron said that when participants had to choose between empathizing with a person or an animal in the first study, it's possible the participants thought it might be easier to empathize with another human.

"Participants indicated that empathizing with animals felt more challenging, and that belief of empathy being more difficult drove them to choose animal empathy less," Cameron said. "It's possible that people felt empathizing with a mind that's unlike our own was more challenging than imagining the experience of another human."

In the second pair of studies, the researchers recruited an additional 192 and 197 participants, respectively, who completed a pair of choice tasks.

In the first task, the participants were given the choice between empathizing with a person or not engaging in empathy and simply describing the person. Then, in a separate task, the participants were given the same choice but with an animal.

"Once humans and animals were no longer in competition, the story changed," Cameron said. "When people had the chance to either empathize with or remain detached from a human stranger, people avoided empathy, which replicates the previous studies we've done. For animals, though, they didn't show that avoidance pattern. And actually, when we decoupled humans from animals, people actually were more likely to choose to empathize with an animal than a human."

While further studies will need to be done to see if these findings extend to other animals, Cameron said the results could have interesting implications. For example, if it's true that people empathize less with animals if animal interests are pitted against human interests, that could affect how people feel about environmental policies.

"If people perceive choices about empathy in a way that makes it seem like we need to choose between humans or animals with no compromise -- for example, choosing between using a parcel of land or conserving it for animals -- they may be more likely to side with humans," Cameron said. "But there may be ways in which those conversations could be tweaked to shape how people are thinking about managing their empathy."

Read more at Science Daily

Walking in their shoes: Using virtual reality to elicit empathy in healthcare providers

Research has shown empathy gives healthcare workers the ability to provide appropriate supports and make fewer mistakes. This helps increase patient satisfaction and enhance patient outcomes, resulting in better overall care. In an upcoming issue of the Journal of Medical Imaging and Radiation Sciences, published by Elsevier, multidisciplinary clinicians and researchers from Dalhousie University performed an integrative review to synthesize the findings regarding virtual reality (VR) as a pedagogical tool for eliciting empathetic behavior in medical radiation technologists (MRTs).

Informally, empathy is often described as the capacity to put oneself in the shoes of another. Empathy is essential to patient-centered care and crucial to the development of therapeutic relationships between carers (healthcare providers, healthcare students, and informal caregivers such as parents, spouses, friends, family, clergy, social workers, and fellow patients) and care recipients. Currently, there is a need for the development of effective tools and approaches that are standardizable, low-risk, safe-to-fail, easily repeatable, and could assist in eliciting empathetic behavior.

This research synthesis looked at studies investigating VR experiences that ranged from a single eight-minute session to sessions lasting 20-25 minutes in duration delivered on two separate days, both in immersive VR environments where participants assumed the role of a care recipient, and non-immersive VR environments where the participants assumed the role of a care provider in a simulated care setting. The two types of studies helped researchers gain an understanding of what it is like to have a specific disease or need and to practice interacting with virtual care recipients.

"Although the studies we looked at don't definitively show VR can help sustain empathy behaviors over time, there is a lot of promise for research and future applications in this area," explained lead author Megan Brydon, MSc, BHSc, RTNM, IWK Health Centre, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

The authors conclude that VR may provide an effective and wide-ranging tool for the learning of care recipients' perspectives and that future studies should seek to determine which VR experiences are the most effective in evoking empathetic behaviors. They recommend that these studies employ high order designs that are better able to control biases.

From Science Daily

The brain area with which we interpret the world

 Usually, the different areas in the cerebrum take on a very specific function. For example, they process our movements or things we see or hear, i.e. direct physical information. However, some areas of the brain come into play when dealing with more advanced mental tasks. They process incoming information that has already been pre-processed and is thus already at an abstract level.

It was already known that the inferior parietal lobe (IPL) is one of these regions in the human brain. Nevertheless, it was unclear how this area is able to process such very different functions. In a large study, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) in Leipzig and McGill University in Montreal have helped to solve this question. According to their findings, the different parts of the IPL specialize in different cognitive functions -- such as attention, language, and social cognition, with the latter reflecting the ability for perspective taking. At the same time, these areas work together with many other brain regions in a process-specific way. When it comes to language comprehension, the anterior IPL in the left hemisphere of the brain becomes active. For attention, it is the anterior IPL in the right side of the brain. If, on the other hand, social skills are required, the posterior parts of the IPL in both hemispheres of the brain spring into action simultaneously. "Social cognition requires the most complex interpretation," explains Ole Numssen, first author of the underlying study, which has now been published in the journal eLife. "Therefore, the IPLs on both sides of the brain probably work together here."

Moreover, these individual sub-areas then cooperate with different regions of the rest of the brain. In the case of attention and language, each IPL subregion links primarily to areas on one side of the brain. With social skills, it's areas on both sides. Again, this shows that the more complex the task, the more intensive the interaction with other areas.

"Our results provide insight into the basic functioning of the human brain. We show how our brains dynamically adapt to changing requirements. To do this, it links specialized individual areas, such as the IPL, with other more general regions. The more demanding the tasks, the more intensively the individual areas interact with each other. This makes highly complex functions such as language or social skills possible," says Ole Numssen. "The IPL may ultimately be considered as one of the areas with which we interpret the world."

Even in great apes, Numssen says, brain regions that correspond to the IPL do not only process purely physical stimuli, but also more complex information. Throughout evolution, they seem to have always been responsible for processing increasingly complex content. However, parts of the IPL are unique to the human brain and are not found in great apes -- a hint that this region has evolved in the course of evolution to enable key functions of human cognition.

The researchers from Leipzig and Montreal investigated such brain-behavior correlations with the help of three tasks that the study participants had to solve while lying in the MRI scanner. In the first task, they had to prove their understanding of language. To do this, they saw meaningful words such as "pigeon" and "house," but also words without meaning (known as pseudowords) such as "pulre," and had to decide whether it was a real word or not. A second task tested visual-spatial attention. For this task, they had to react to stimuli on one side of the screen, although they expected something to happen on the other side. The third task probed their ability for perspective taking using the so-called Sally Anne test. This is a comic strip consisting of four pictures in which two people interact with each other. A question in the end could only be answered correctly if the study participants were able to put themselves in the shoes of the respective persons.

From Science Daily

Empathy and perspective taking: How social skills are built

 Understanding what other people want, how they feel, and how they see the world is becoming increasingly important in our complex, globalised society. Social skills enable us to make friends and create a network of people who support us. But not everyone finds it easy to interact with other people. One of the main reasons is that two of the most important social skills -- empathy, i.e. being able to empathise with the other person's emotions, and the ability to take a perspective, i.e. being able to gain an information by adopting another person's point of view -- are developed to different degrees.

Researchers have long been trying to find out what helps one to understand others. The more you know about these two social skills, the better you can help people to form social relationships. However, it still not exactly clear what empathy and perspective taking are (the latter is also known as "theory of mind"). Being able to read a person's emotions through their eyes, understand a funny story, or interpret the action of another person -- in everyday life there are always social situations that require these two important abilities. However, they each require a combination of different individual subordinate skills. If it is necessary to interpret looks and facial expressions in one situation, in another it may be necessary to think along with the cultural background of the narrator or to know his or her current needs.

To date, countless studies have been conducted that examine empathy and perspective taking as a whole. However, it has not yet been clarified what constitutes the core of both competencies and where in the brain their bases lie. Philipp Kanske, former MPI CBS research group leader and currently professor at the TU Dresden, together with Matthias Schurz from the Donders Institute in Nijmegen, Netherlands, and an international team of researchers, have now developed a comprehensive explanatory model.

"Both of these abilities are processed in the brain by a 'main network' specialised in empathy or changing perspective, which is activated in every social situation. But, depending on the situation, it also involves additional networks," Kanske explains, referring to the results of the study, which has just been published in the journal Psychological Bulletin. If we read the thoughts and feelings of others, for example, from their eyes, other additional regions are involved than if we deduce them from their actions or from a narrative. "The brain is thus able to react very flexibly to individual requirements."

For empathy, a main network that can recognise acutely significant situations, for example, by processing fear, works together with additional specialised regions, for example, for face or speech recognition. When changing perspective, in turn, the regions that are also used for remembering the past or fantasising about the future, i.e., for thoughts that deal with things that cannot be observed at the moment, are active as the core network. Here too, additional brain regions are switched on in each concrete situation.

Through their analyses, the researchers have also found out that particularly complex social problems require a combination of empathy and a change of perspective. People who are particularly competent socially seem to view the other person in both ways -- on the basis of feelings and on the basis of thoughts. In their judgement, they then find the right balance between the two.

"Our analysis also shows, however, that a lack of one of the two social skills can also mean that not this skill as a whole is limited. It may be that only a certain factor is affected, such as understanding facial expressions or speech melody," adds Kanske. A single test is therefore not sufficient to certify a person's lack of social skills. Rather, there must be a series of tests to actually assess them as having little empathy, or as being unable to take the other person's point of view.

Read more at Science Daily