Originally published January 12 2006
Hormone study explains why neglected children have trouble in society
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Psychologists from the University of Wisconsin have produced a study of children deprived of affection at an early age, and the study found abnormal hormonal activity that reveals just how these children's social skills are impaired.
Children who are deprived of a loving caregiver in their early years may experience abnormal activity of vasopressin and oxytocin, two hormones essential to forming social bonds and achieving emotional intimacy, suggests a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The new finding by psychologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison demonstrates for the first time that severe neglect and social isolation can directly affect a young child's neurobiology in ways that potentially influence emotional behaviors.
"Questions about how children regulate emotions and form social bonds [have] not really made contact with recent advances in the neurosciences," says senior author Seth Pollak, a UW-Madison professor of psychology, psychiatry and pediatrics and researcher at the Waisman Center for Human Development.
"It's exciting that we've taken an area of child development that has been very descriptive and can now look at it in a more mechanistic way," notes doctoral student Alison Wismer Fries, the lead author of the study.
Orphanages in developing nations, however, are often overwhelmed by the numbers of children in their care.
Consequently, many children adopted from such orphanages have spent some part of their early years without the emotional and physical contact that is so critical for social development.
Study co-author Toni Ziegler, an endocrinologist at the UW-Madison National Primate Research Center, developed a technique that enables researchers to track vasopressin and oxytocin levels through the analysis of urine -- a capability that is crucial to making the link between social behavior and hormones.
The UW-Madison scientists worked with 18 four-year-old children who had lived in Russian and Romanian orphanages before being adopted into homes in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, area.
The abnormal willingness of a child to seek comfort from unfamiliar adults -- even in the presence of the adopted parent -- is one common instance of such behavior, says Wismer Fries.
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