This  week BPS Research Digest takes a look at aggressive behaviour in children, reviewing Sheehan, M.J., Watson, M.W. (2008) paper,  and how parents  should avoid exacerbating such behaviour with harsh combative discipline.

Michael Sheehan and Malcolm Watson followed 440 children and their mothers for five years. On four occasions during that time, the mothers answered questions about their own style of parenting and their children’s behaviour. At the start of the study, the children’s average age was 10 years and by the final assessment their average age was 15.
The results revealed two-way influences between children’s behaviour and their mothers’ parenting style. On the one hand, children’s aggressive behaviour at younger ages predicted more disciplining by mothers, including more use of combative discipline (both verbal and physical) and more use of reasoning techniques. On the other hand, a greater use of harsh, aggressive discipline by mothers predicted increased future aggressive behaviour by their children. 

Link to read this BPS report

Source: BPS Research Digest, Sheehan, M.J., Watson, M.W. (2008). Reciprocal influences between maternal discipline techniques and aggression in children and adolescents. Aggressive Behavior, 34(3), 245-255. DOI: 10.1002/ab.20241

 

Researchers at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston are studying a number of medications that may help restore the fragile balance of chemicals or neurotransmitters in the brain destroyed by cocaine abuse, making recovery more possible.

“With chronic cocaine use, there are changes in the brain that affect neurotransmitters that are responsible for impulsivity and decision making,” said F. Gerard Moeller, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the medical school. “If we can restore the balance of the neurotransmitters back to the way it was before the cocaine, then other therapies such as behavioral therapy will work better.” [continue reading…]

You went to a wedding yesterday. The service was beautiful, the food and drink flowed and there was dancing all night. But people tell you that you are in hospital, that you have been in hospital for weeks, and that you didn’t go to a wedding yesterday at all.

The experience of false memories like this following neurological damage is known as confabulation. The reasons why patients experience false memories such as these has largely remained a mystery. Now a new study conducted by Dr Martha Turner and colleagues at University College London, published in the May 2008 issue of Cortex offers some clues as to what might be going on.

The authors studied 50 patients who had damage to different parts of the brain, and found that those who confabulated all shared damage to the inferior medial prefrontal cortex, a region in the centre of the front part of the brain just behind the eyes.

“The patients who confabulated had varying levels of memory ability, and varying levels of “executive functioning” (the set of cognitive abilities overseen by the prefrontal cortex that control and regulate other abilities and behaviours), so confabulation cannot be as simple as a combination of these deficits. Instead it must be due to a specific function controlled by the inferior medial prefrontal cortex. Damage to this region appears to lead to the convincing experience of false memories” says Martha Turner, corresponding author for this study.

This study has implications for our understanding of how the human brain controls memory, and how most of us are able to easily tell apart true memories from things we have imagined, dreamed or invented.

Source: AlphaGallileo. The article “Confabulation: Damage to a specific inferior medial prefrontal system” by Martha S. Turner, Lisa Cipolotti, Tarek A. Yousry and Tim Shallice, and it appears in Cortex, Volume 44, Issue 6 (May 2008), pp 637-648, published by Elsevier Masson, in Italy. Full text of the article featured above is available upon request. v.brancolini@elsevier.com to obtain a copy.