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Imagine a situation where one child is teasing another. While the child does it in a playful way, the other child considers it hostile and reacts aggressively.
Behavior like this happens all the time with children, but the fact that some people react in a neutral way and others act aggressively is a mystery.
In a new study, a team of researchers led by the University of Iowa reports that it has identified a brain marker associated with aggression in toddlers. Research has shown that in experiments measuring a type of brain waves in children aged 2 and a half to 3 and a half years old, toddlers who had lower peaks in the airwaves P3 brain were confronted with a change of situation
The findings could lead to early identification of children at risk for aggressive behavior and may help stem these impulses before adolescence, an age at which research has shown that aggressive behavior is more difficult to treat.
"There are all kinds of ambiguous social signals in our environment," says Isaac Petersen, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences and Brain Sciences of the UI and corresponding author of the study. "And, when children are not able to detect a change in social cues, they may be more prone to misinterpret this social index than hostile rather than playful.
"Children respond to the same social cues in different ways, and we think this is due to differences in the way they interpret this information, whether it is neutral or hostile," said Petersen.
The P3 wave is part of a series of brainwaves generated when an individual evaluates and reacts to a change in the environment, for example changes in benchmarks in a social interaction . Previous research, mainly in adults, has shown that individuals with shorter P3 wavelengths when they are facing a change in the environment tend to be more aggressive. As such, scientists believe that P3 is a key indicator of aggression, as well as associated with depression and schizophrenia.
To detect these differences in children, researchers recruited 153 infants and, in one-on-one sessions, each equipped with a network of head sensors that measured brain wave activity. While the children watched silent cartoons on a television screen, the tone of the tones changed and the researchers measured the P3 brain wave accompanying each change of tone.
The change in height is analogous to a change in social interaction in which the brain – consciously or unconsciously – reacts to a change in the environment. In this case, it was the change in height.
Children with a shorter peak in the P3 brain wave accompanying the tone change were rated more aggressive by their parents than children with more pronounced P3 peaks.
The difference in P3 peaks in aggressive and non-aggressive children "was statistically significant," said Petersen, and the effect was the same for boys and girls.
"Their brains are less successful in detecting changes in the environment," Petersen said of children with shorter P3 brainwave peaks. "And because they are less able to detect changes in the environment, they are more likely to misinterpret ambiguous social information as hostile, which makes them react aggressively. important to note that may explain the aggression that future research should consider. "
The researchers tested the same children at the age of 30, 36 and 42 months to further explore the association with P3 brainwave and aggression.
"This cerebral marker has not been widely studied in children and has never been studied in early childhood in relation to aggression," says Petersen, who has an appointment at the # 39; Institute of Neuroscience of Iowa. "It could be one of many tools that can be used in the future to detect the risks of aggression that may not show up during behavioral screening."
Research is important because early interventions are more effective in stemming aggression, says Petersen, a clinical psychologist.
"The data suggest that early interventions and preventive approaches are more effective at reducing aggression than interventions targeting aggression later in childhood or adolescence when behavior is more anchored and stable, "he says.
The paper was published on September 26 in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. It's entitled "A Longitudinal In-Person Survey on the Association Between the P3 ERP Component and the Outsourcing of Behavior Problems in Young Children".
The kids were tested at Indiana University-Bloomington. Caroline Hoyniak and John Bates are the authors of Indiana University. Angela Staples of Eastern Michigan University and Dennis Molfese of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are contributing authors.
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