For children, stress can go a long way. A little bit provides a platform for learning, adapting and coping. But a lot of it -- chronic¹, toxic² stress like poverty, neglect and physical abuse -- can have lasting³ negative impacts. A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers recently showed these kinds of stressors, experienced in early life, might be changing the parts of developing children's brains responsible for learning, memory and the processing of stress and emotion. These changes may be tied to negative impacts on behavior, health, employment and even the choice of romantic partners later in life.

 

The study, published in the journal Biological Psychiatry⁴, could be important for public policy leaders, economists⁵ and epidemiologists（流行病学家）, among others, says study lead author and recent UW Ph.D. graduate Jamie Hanson.

 

"We haven't really understood why things that happen when you're 2, 3, 4 years old stay with you and have a lasting impact," says Seth Pollak, co-leader of the study and UW-Madison professor of psychology⁶.

 

Yet, early life stress has been tied before to depression, anxiety, heart disease, cancer, and a lack of educational and employment success, says Pollak, who is also director of the UW Waisman Center's Child Emotion Research Laboratory.

 

"Given how costly⁷ these early stressful experiences are for society … unless we understand what part of the brain is affected⁸, we won't be able to tailor something to do about it," he says.

 

For the study, the team recruited 128 children around age 12 who had experienced either physical abuse, neglect early in life or came from low socioeconomic status households.

 

Researchers conducted extensive interviews with the children and their caregivers, documenting behavioral problems and their cumulative⁹ life stress. They also took images of the children’s brains, focusing on the hippocampus（海马） and amygdala（扁桃腺）, which are involved in emotion and stress processing. They were compared to similar children from middle-class households who had not been maltreated.

 

Hanson and the team outlined by hand each child's hippocampus and amygdala and calculated their volumes. Both structures are very small, especially in children (the word amygdala is Greek for almond, reflecting its size and shape in adults), and Hanson and Pollak say the automated¹⁰ software measurements from other studies may be prone¹¹ to error.

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