14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) discovered in a new scientific study that children who were neglected by their parents, particularly their mothers, are more likely to exhibit a potentially-dangerous behavior called indiscriminate friendliness.
This behavior is characterized by children's predisposition and willingness to befriend whatever adult they come across. Naturally, this can be dangerous in real-life situations, where kids are oftentimes molested or abducted by strangers who approach them by claiming to mean well.
The new investigation is the first ever to associate this behavior with modifications that occur in the human brain following events that took place in early life. Details of the work appear in a paper published in the December 1 issue of the scientific journal Biological Psychiatry.
For this study, researchers analyzed several children who spent time in an orphanage or other state institution during their early years. All test participants were deprived of interactions with their mothers during this sensitive time. These separations lasted long periods of time before adoptions went through.
In order to detect any potential changes in the brains of children, researchers used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to look at test subjects' brains, Science Blog reports. The group found that a region of the brain called the amygdala is more responsive when the adoptive mothers are around.
The amygdala is a portion of the brain critical to our survival. It codes the fight-or-flight response, and is also responsible for underlying some negative emotions, such as fear and anxiety. In the fMRI scans, the amygdala lighted up more in children who were neglected than in their peers who felt included.
This correlation was found to get increasingly stronger the more time children spent in orphanages. Reduced amygdala discrimination has been proven in other studies to be correlated to children exhibiting indiscriminate friendliness towards adults.
“The early relationship between children and their parents or primary caregivers has implications for their social interaction later in life, and we believe the amygdala is involved in this process,” explains UCLA resident physician Aviva Olsavsky, who is a psychiatry student at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.
“Our findings suggest that even for children who have formed attachments to their adoptive parents, this early period of deprivation has led to changes in the brain that were likely adaptations and that may persist over time,” concludes the scientist, who was also the first author of the research paper.