American researchers have identified a brain marker linked to aggression in young children. According to them, the brains of young children who tend to react in a hostile way with their congeners cannot correctly interpret the changes during social interactions.
Why are some children more aggressive than others when they play? According to an American study published this Wednesday, September 26 in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, the difference is due to a brain marker. Ultimately, this discovery could help treat aggression early before it becomes entrenched and risky behavior.
Researchers at the University of Iowa followed 153 children at 30, 36 and then 40 months. During individual sessions, they adorned them with a net equipped with brain sensors to measure the activity of their brain waves. Each child had to watch a silent cartoon while listening to a series of sounds. The researchers then measured the rhythm of the brain waves accompanying each change in tone, the latter corresponding in children’s brains to a change during a social interaction. As a result, children in whom scientists observed weaker peaks of P3 waves (brain waves generated during a change in the environment) during tone changes were described by their parents as more aggressive than the others.
“There are plenty of ambiguous social cues in our environment, “says Isaac Petersen, author of the study.” And when children’s brains are unable to detect a change in social relationships, they can tend to misinterpreting it, in a hostile way, and reacting aggressively instead of taking it for a game “, he adds. And to clarify:” Children respond to the same signals in different ways and we think that is due to how they interpret these signals “.
Track children at risk as early as possible
Previous research carried out in adults had already shown that individuals with a lower peak of P3 waves during a change of situation were often more aggressive than others. Also, scientists had already identified these waves as a key indicator in aggression, depression but also schizophrenia.
However, “this brain marker had not yet been studied on a large scale in children and had never been studied as a correlator of aggression,” says Petersen with satisfaction. Ultimately, these results could help to identify early children with aggressive temperaments and to follow them in order to calm these impulses as soon as possible. Because “it has been proven that early interventions and preventive approaches are more effective in reducing aggression than late interventions intervening during adolescence when the behavior is already well anchored”, specifies the researcher. However, “it is important to remember that other possibilities could explain the aggressiveness”. “Further research should therefore look into this,” he concludes.
Last May, a Swedish study had already identified neurons responsible for aggression in humans. According to researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, this is put in place by a group of rarely studied brain cells present in the ventral premamillary nucleus (PMv) of the hypothalamus.
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