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Researchers find child abuse might affect perception
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Wednesday, June 26, 2002
University of Wisconsin researchers found children tend to interpret the same facial expressions very differently, depending on their personalities and on whether they’ve experienced trauma, the Washington Post reported this week.
UW’s Seth D. Pollak and Doris J. Kistler showed a sampling of 40 children a series of faces showing various emotions, combinations of emotions and ambiguous emotions. The faces were digitally altered and standardized. Children who had been abused were far more likely to identify a facial expression as showing anger, the researchers found.
This study in how affective experiences can temper perception was difficult to conceive of and set up, according to the study.
“This issue is extremely difficult to investigate because of the variety of sensory experiences to which humans are exposed immediately after birth,” read the report, published online last week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Children who have been abused might have be more sensitive to signs of anger, Pollack and Kistler speculated, also saying an abused child’s perception may be a result of the child trying to protect himself. Such children might “overinterpret signals as threatening and perhaps make incorrect judgments about other facial expressions,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
A second study, published in the June 21 issue of Science, showed results from when scientists at Stanford University did brain scans on 15 people while they viewed “fearful” and “happy faces.”
People appeared to have a uniform response to fear, but extroverted people’s brains responded more to happy faces than did introverted people’s brains.
