Shackman Wismer Fries

This study by Shackman, Wismer Fries, and Pollak (2008) looked at the connections between maltreatment of children and their neural development. They specifically focused on the neural structures and pathways connected to emotional and behavioral reactions. First, they looked at attentional biases. In normal development, children learn over many years how to selectively attend to only relevant stimuli. The temporal and posterior cortices are involved and when it comes to emotional relevance, the amygdala, MD, and orbitofrontal cortex also play a part. Shackman et al. (2008) found that there are deficits in processing threat related information in children that experience early adversity. These deficits include increased distractibility, higher …show more content…
In addition, there were abnormalities in the neurotransmitters and axis regulation or HPA (Shackman et al., 2008). Additionally, many of these studies were done on nonhumans. Just looking at attention itself, they found better social behavior in children that were successful at selective attention. Therefore, this deficit in selective attention for maltreated children causes the children to eventually transfer the associations they make in adverse circumstances to the outside world thus causing maladaptation, specifically in identifying social cues. Therefore, Shackman et al. (2008) concluded that a child’s past experiences function as a guide to the brain pathways involved in threat related stimuli processing, which can result in difficulties in social situations. After tackling attentional biases, Shackman et al. (2008) looked at emotional elicitation and regulation. They found that in general, children that experienced abuse or neglect were