Abused Children Experience High Anger Exposure

Childhood maltreatment is a critical problem in the United States. Much attention has been paid to the negative outcomes suffered by victims of abuse. Less attention has been devoted to understanding the emotional environments of maltreated children. One assumption, which has stood without empirical test, is that abused children encounter a high degree of anger in their home environments. Anger exposure is thought to be a source of stress for children in abusive environments and a potential link between the experience of abuse and the development of health and behavioral problems. We tested this notion by assessing data on over 1,000 parents and guardians of 3- to 17-year-old children who were participants in child development studies. Abuse was measured via records from Child Protective Services regarding substantiated and unsubstantiated claims of abuse as well as parent/guardian report. We compared self-reported experiences of anger from parents/guardians of children who have experienced abuse with those who have not. We found support for the claim that caregivers of abused children experience and express high levels of anger. Better characterization of the emotional environments in which abused children develop is critical for understanding how and why abuse affects children and has important implications for informing interventions.

Early adversity and learning: implications for typical and atypical behavioral development

BACKGROUND

Children who experience early adversity often develop emotion regulatory problems, but little is known about the mechanisms that mediate this relation. We tested whether general associative learning processes contribute to associations between adversity, in the form of child maltreatment, and negative behavioral outcomes.

METHODS

Eighty-one participants between 12 and 17 years of age were recruited for this study and completed a probabilistic learning Task. Forty-one of these participants had been exposed to physical abuse, a form of early adversity. Forty additional participants without any known history of maltreatment served as a comparison group. All participants (and their parents) also completed portions of the Youth Life Stress Interview to understand adolescent's behavior. We calculated measures of associative learning, and also constructed mathematical models of learning.

RESULTS

We found that adolescents exposed to high levels of adversity early in their lives had lower levels of associative learning than comparison adolescents. In addition, we found that impaired associative learning partially explained the higher levels of behavioral problems among youth who suffered early adversity. Using mathematical models, we also found that two components of learning were specifically affected in children exposed to adversity: choice variability and biases in their beliefs about the likelihood of rewards in the environment.

CONCLUSIONS

Participants who had been exposed to early adversity were less able than their peers to correctly learn which stimuli were likely to result in reward, even after repeated feedback. These individuals also used information about known rewards in their environments less often. In addition, individuals exposed to adversity made decisions early in the learning process as if rewards were less consistent and occurred more at random. These data suggest one mechanism through which early life experience shapes behavioral development.

Early deprivation impairs the development of balance and bilateral coordination

This study examined balance and bilateral coordination skills in a sample of internationally adopted, post-institutionalized (PI) children. We compared the performance of these PI children to two age-matched groups. One was a group of children who were internationally adopted from foster care (FC). The second group consisted of non-adopted children being raised in their birth families, who served as controls (Control). Both PI and FC children scored lower than control children on balance, while PI children scored lower than both FC and control children on bilateral coordination. These results suggest that aspects of institutional rearing impact the development of bilateral coordination, while factors common to internationally adopted children other than institutionalization impact the development of balance. Region of birth (Asia, Latin/South America, Russia/Eastern Europe) did not moderate associations between institutional duration and bilateral coordination.

Gross motor development in children adopted from orphanage settings

AIM

This study sought to examine the effect of environmental enrichment on the motor skills of children adopted from orphanage settings. We investigated balance and bilateral coordination skills in 33 internationally adopted postinstitutionalized children (16 males, 17 females; age range 8 y 5 mo-15 y 10 mo; mean age 10 y 9 mo; SD 2 y 2 mo) and compared them with 34 non-institutionalized children (21 males, 13 females; age range 8 y 3 mo-14 y 10 mo; mean age 11 y 2 mo; SD 2 y 1 mo) being raised in their birth families.

METHOD

The children were individually administered the balance and bilateral coordination subtests of the Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency in a research laboratory. Parents completed questionnaires about developmental history, family environment, and orphanage care.

RESULTS

Postinstitutionalized children showed motor system delays compared with the non-institutionalized comparison children (postinstitutionalized balance mean 9.44, SD 5.92, comparison children balance mean 14.12, SD 4.39; postinstitutionalized bilateral coordination mean 11.97, SD 5.43, comparison children mean 19.97, SD 3.97). The length of time that children remained institutionalized before adoption predicted balance delays (b=-1.57, t=-2.33, p=0.027) and the severity of caregiving deprivation the children experienced correlated with bilateral coordination (r=-0.44, p=0.013).

INTERPRETATION

These findings suggest that institutionalized settings do not provide the early life experiences needed for the development of age-level motor skills later in childhood and that simple environmental enrichment following adoption is not enough to remediate skills. Children who have experienced early institutional care may benefit from early identification and targeted intervention.

Sentence comprehension in postinstitutionalized school-age children

PURPOSE

In this study, the authors investigated sentence comprehension and spatial working memory abilities in a sample of internationally adopted, postinstitutionalized (PI) children. The authors compared the performance of these PI children with that of an age-matched group of children living with their birth families. They hypothesized that PI children would perform below clinical threshold on tasks of sentence comprehension and that poor sentence comprehension would be associated with poor performance in working memory.

METHOD

Twenty-three PI children and 36 comparison children were administered sentence comprehension and spatial memory tasks from standardized assessments.

RESULTS

Some oral sentence comprehension skills and the spatial working memory skills were weaker in the school-age PI children than in the age-matched comparison children. A mediational analysis demonstrated that poor spatial working memory performance partially explains the sentence comprehension differences between the 2 groups.

CONCLUSION

These findings provide valuable information to better plan early intervention and special education for PI children.

Neurodevelopmental effects of early deprivation in postinstitutionalized children

The neurodevelopmental sequelae of early deprivation were examined by testing (N = 132) 8- and 9-year-old children who had endured prolonged versus brief institutionalized rearing or rearing in the natal family. Behavioral tasks included measures that permit inferences about underlying neural circuitry. Children raised in institutionalized settings showed neuropsychological deficits on tests of visual memory and attention, as well as visually mediated learning and inhibitory control. Yet, these children performed at developmentally appropriate levels on similar tests where auditory processing was also involved and on tests assessing executive processes such as rule acquisition and planning. These findings suggest that specific aspects of brain-behavioral circuitry may be particularly vulnerable to postnatal experience.