The Good News About Bad Behavior

by Katherine Reynolds Lewis

  3

  The Brain and Discipline

  A MIDDLE-AGED MAN LAY FLAT on his back on the bed of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. He waited to hear his mother’s critical comments so scientists could study his brain’s reaction.

  His gray socks pointed up toward the ceiling, and a white blanket covered his body from ankle to neck. His head poked inside a giant white cylinder containing the MRI’s high-powered magnet—a combination of four coiled wires that together would create a web of magnetic fields as a current passed through the wire. At eight and a half feet, the chunky plastic body of the MRI took up nearly one-third of the room.

  Three scientists bustled around the man with cords, explaining what they were doing as they hooked up equipment. The man’s gaze followed them. His head rested in a plastic cage with a camera at eye level. A wire running through the cage would help form a magnetic field around his head when the machine was turned on. The MRI imaging technologist would control which wires received a current, depending on the angle required to capture the desired image.

  Before entering the room, the scientists used a wand like the ones used in airport security to identify any metal on their bodies or the study participant’s body. The machine generates a 3 Tesla magnetic field, about sixty times as strong as a refrigerator magnet, so any overlooked metallic object could become a dangerous projectile near the MRI. Even something as small as a forgotten hairpin could be ripped out and sent flying into the magnet.

  I watched this scene from the room next door, looking through a giant observation window while seated at a row of tables that held computer monitors, phones, a tangle of cords, and a few ancient-looking pieces of equipment. Since starting the research that became this book, I’d wanted to observe an fMRI (functional MRI) experiment. It was finally about to happen, in the basement of the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University Medical Center.

  The experiment, a collaboration between the New School for Social Research professor Wendy D’Andrea and the University of Pittsburgh, aimed to examine the impact of criticism on the brains of people with a history of depression, mood disorders, borderline personality, anxiety, or trauma. The goal was to understand how people with mental illness disassociate in the moment of stress, what helps them self-regulate, and also how and why they often fail to connect their symptoms with trauma in their past. This study provided me with a glimpse of affective neuroscience at work—a field devoted to understanding how our emotions, behavior, motivations, and relationships connect to the physical structures of our brain.

  Nadia Nieves, manager of the New School’s Trauma and Affective Psychophysiology Lab, had already spent three days with the study participant, putting him through a barrage of psychological tasks and questionnaires. He had experienced deep depression for many years but was a candidate for the experiment because he was presently stable.

  Nieves asked him to think of an important person in his life, such as his mother, and then to imagine that he overheard her making critical comments about him. She asked him to write down the words she used. Those phrases would be what psychologists call “scripts,” because they unfold the same way every time, like lines in a play. They’re at the center of an entire body of research into criticism and self-regulation.

  The scientists walked out of the MRI room and took seats beside me. Nieves adjusted some dials on the equipment in front of her, and I heard the burst of a female voice.

  “He’s a perfectionist and expects perfection from those working—”

  The sound cut off. Nieves had accidentally played the scripts out loud.

  She typed some words on her screen to see if the study participant could read them. She adjusted the sound levels and checked the monitors that showed his heartbeat and breath patterns, key signs of the body’s response to stress and emotions. Then she and the technologist, Natacha Gordon, started calibrating the scanner.

  It was on.

  I heard a loud mechanical whirring noise and then three buzzes, a rhythm that repeated. Then a long, higher-pitched beep. Another beep. It was like a 1960s vision of a starship control room.

  On the other side of my chair, Gordon pulled up a cross-sectional image of the man’s brain. It looked sort of like an X-ray, but with more detail and different structures in white. Three more images appeared, each at a different angle. An even louder series of beeps began.

  “It’s too loud,” the participant said. His voice came through a speaker on the desk in front of Nieves. She looked over at Gordon.

  The truth is that it’s noisy inside a magnetic resonance imaging scanner. You hear a constant loud whirr and occasional knocking of parts as the machine shifts position. The side of the scanner is just inches from your face. It would be claustrophobic even if you hadn’t been instructed to stay perfectly still to avoid blurring the image. Many study participants couldn’t tolerate the experience.

  “I don’t think we can do anything about the sound of the scanner,” Gordon told Nieves. “We can try to give him more padding, but I mean, you saw the padding he got.”

  “Do you want me to stop the scan?” Nieves asked the participant through a thin microphone poking out from the equipment in front of her.

  “Yeah, just for now.”

  Gordon clicked on her keyboard. The room quieted. I crossed my fingers.

  “Hey, are you okay?” Nieves asked through the microphone.

  “Yeah, I’ll be fine. I just want to get this over with.”

  “If the scanner is too loud, though, it’s going to be like that for the rest of the time,” she told him.

  “Okay, that’s fine, let’s just do it.”

  Gordon clicked. The loud beeping—the sound the scanner made when it was collecting data—resumed. After the scan ended, the participant told me that the calibration experience was the hardest—just lying still surrounded by noise. He had to use reframing techniques that Nieves taught him. That helped manage the stress. He imagined he was lying in his bed at home, watching TV. Once the tasks started, focusing on completing them helped him feel less uncomfortable.

  Over the next ninety minutes, Gordon and Nieves guided him through a series of exercises, such as asking whether certain words were relevant to him and telling him to guess heads or tails on a coin flip. He responded verbally or through a plastic device in his hand and a computer mouse taped to his leg. He rated his mood before and after each set of tasks.

  Then Nieves played the negative comments, which her lab calls Hooleys, after the scientist who devised the method. The participant’s toes wiggled a bit, but he didn’t seem overly disturbed by hearing his mother’s criticism flowing out of a speaker while scientists watched his brain response. I felt surprise at how mundane the scene looked, knowing what must have been roiling inside his head.

  NEUROSCIENTISTS HAVE BEEN STUDYING THE inner workings of the brain for decades. They’ve figured out the general purpose of each physical structure. The prefrontal cortex governs higher-order tasks like thinking, emotion regulation, planning, and problem-solving. The amygdala, sometimes thought of as the survival brain, controls physiological responses to emotions such as fear or excitement. Researchers examine still pictures of the brain’s structures in MRI machines and analyze real-time changes in the brain via fMRI studies, like the one I observed, in order to see which neurons activate while people are watching a video, recalling a memory, or experiencing an emotion. In rats, they may inject a stimulant to see how the brain regions change.

  Over the years scientists have discovered that learning and repeated experiences actually alter the physical structure of the brain, creating new neuronal pathways. This is especially important in children, whose brains are more plastic.

  Humans are unique among mammals in having an extended juvenile phase of life, with brains that do not fully mature until our midtwenties. Neuroscientists believe that this quarter-century of development gives humans a giant advantage by providing extra time in which the brain can b
e shaped to be creative, solve problems, navigate social situations, and respond to any number of new circumstances. It also gives parents a crucial role in creating an environment in which children can learn, develop, and grow. Our genes and inborn temperament are just the starting point for the person we will become. (A child’s in-born temperament also may influence the parenting they receive. Some research has shown that the most challenging kids elicit strong-arm parenting from both their own parents and unrelated adults.)

  We know parents are important. It’s an obvious point, and it’s backed by decades of research on human behavior. But as neuroscience has matured, people like D’Andrea are now beginning to link behaviors to brain circuits—to connect the two fields. It is becoming increasingly clear that people’s emotions and social behaviors have neural signatures. Scientists are starting to map the mind onto the physical structures of the brain.

  In particular, researchers want to understand exactly how the parent-child relationship influences the development of the brain’s ability to self-regulate. They’re asking questions such as: How does physical contact or proximity with a parent change the brain response? What about parental empathy? What are the differences in children’s brains when parents nag them versus when they are verbally abusive? How does a mother’s encouragement nourish the brain? What happens inside children’s brains during a defiant moment? Or when they experience discipline?

  The experiences of childhood sculpt the brain in ways that can stay with a person for life. For instance, children raised in orphanages often experience lasting brain changes because, even though their physical needs are met, they’re unable to form a secure emotional attachment to a caregiver and they experience chronic stress. Studies of the brains of children raised in Romanian orphanages with ten-to-one infant-adult ratios found abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala. As a result, the children were more impulsive and had deficits in attention and intellect.

  Does this mean that experiencing any stress at all is bad for children?

  Not at all. It’s important for babies and young children to learn to tolerate moderate amounts of stress, and then to experience relief. For example, when infants cry to be fed and are nursed by a responsive mother, their brains release a flood of endorphins into their nervous systems. These are the “feel-good” hormones we experience after exercise. This arousal-relief cycle actually helps tone infants’ brains by developing self-regulatory neural patterns and building trust that their needs will be met.

  Similarly, when children separate from their parents to go to preschool, they may be upset and cry. If comforted by loving caregivers—and reunited with the parents later, as promised—they learn confidence and are better protected from developing anxiety in the future. Repeated separation or feelings of anxiety, followed by reassurance and calming, is actually protective. Children who never face stress are more likely to respond with anxiety or overreaction because it’s so unfamiliar.

  The brain consists of nearly 90 billion neurons—individual nerve cells that learn from repeated experience, constantly forming new patterns and connections. The more you cycle through getting ramped up and self-regulating, the stronger those neural networks become. In other words, the better your brain gets at self-regulation.

  The problems arise when children experience neglect or abuse. If they never attach to a responsive caregiver, their self-regulatory systems don’t develop the ability to distinguish real threats from imagined ones, and they tend to overreact. In laboratories, stressful situations cause a spike in neural response in the brains of insecurely attached adults, and they recover less quickly than people with secure attachment. This heightened neural response can lead to aggressive and risky behavior. Indeed, decades of research by psychologists and social workers show that early childhood trauma can cause long-term damage to mental and physical health. It’s not inevitable—human brains are remarkably resilient and morph dramatically throughout adolescence—but early trauma puts you at risk for a number of poor outcomes.

  Scientists began to understand the long tail of trauma in the mid-1990s. A team from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Kaiser Permanente looked at 17,000 mostly white, middle-class, college-educated adults. They asked how many of those people in their childhood had experienced one or more traumas of ten different types: psychological, physical, or sexual abuse; emotional or physical neglect; living with someone who abused substances, was mentally ill, or had been to prison; parental divorce or separation; or witnessing their mother being abused.

  They found that two-thirds of the population had experienced at least one of these adverse childhood events (ACEs) and that one in eight people had experienced four or more. By cross-tabulating ACE scores with health outcomes, they discovered that high ACE scores increased the risk for seven of the ten leading causes of death in the United States. They also found higher risk for depression, unemployment, substance addiction, suicide, and troubled relationships. Since that time, further research has reinforced the broad health impacts of these childhood experiences.

  When it comes to discipline, children who experience corporal punishment, including spanking, are more likely to be aggressive, criminal, and abusive as adults. In addition, psychologists are beginning to find evidence linking harsh verbal abuse to conduct problems and depression, much in the way they’ve linked these problems with physical abuse.

  The University of Pittsburgh psychology professor Ming-Te Wang led a study of harsh verbal discipline—defined as yelling, cursing, or insulting children after misbehavior—in nearly 1,000 families with teenage children. In a 2014 paper, he reported that nearly half of the parents used harsh verbal discipline, but that it wasn’t effective in stopping misconduct. Actually, the children who had been disciplined harshly were more likely to act out or show symptoms of depression when questioned the following year. The same effects were seen with parents who generally had a warm relationship with their children, showing that parental warmth didn’t lessen the negative impact of yelling at or insulting children.

  Bottom line: when adults scream at or insult children, the impact is similar to hitting. Harsh verbal discipline or abuse puts kids into a fight-or-flight state in which they can’t access the higher-order parts of their brain to reason or learn from the experience. Since the parent is the source of stress, they can’t also serve that important calming role. This leaves the child in a persistent state of arousal.

  So what’s left as a discipline technique? Connection and empathy. Increasingly, scientists believe that when children receive empathy or comfort from a parent or trusted adult, they are better able to self-regulate to the point where they can begin learning how to consciously control their behavior. The more they self-calm, the more deeply the experience carves grooves in their brains—in other words, the better they get at self-regulation.

  THE PSYCHOLOGIST JIM COAN DEVISED an unusual experiment to test the importance of empathy in helping us regulate our emotions. One by one, he put sixteen women in an MRI scanner and watched their brains as either a blue O or a red X appeared in front of their faces. The red X meant that they had a 20 percent chance of getting shocked. The blue O meant that they were safe. Coan repeated these steps under three scenarios: lying there alone, holding a stranger’s hand, and holding a spouse’s hand.

  While waiting for the O or X to appear, “your brain lights up like a Christmas tree,” said Coan, who performed the experiment during a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Wisconsin and is now a professor at the University of Virginia. Your amygdala triggers your body’s reaction to threat—which includes physiological responses such as sweat, a faster heartbeat, and quicker breaths—as your body reallocates energy to the muscles that may be called upon to run or do battle. Meanwhile, your prefrontal cortex strains to keep you still and control your desire to scream, “Get me out of here!”

  The prefrontal cortex is the top, outer layer of brain located beneath your forehead. It wraps aroun
d the part of the brain known as the limbic system, which includes the hypothalamus and amygdala. Think of the amygdala and hypothalamus as the short-term survival parts of your brain that are ready for action. Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex governs higher-level functions.

  As Coan collected data, he discovered some striking patterns. In the first scenario, when the women were alone, their brains responded the way brains typically do in response to threat, as just described. In the second scenario, when they were holding a stranger’s hand, there was less activity in the regions of the brain associated with the physiological response, the fight-or-flight reaction, showing that support from another person calmed them. And in the third scenario, their brains were dramatically quieter and less reactive to the threat when they were holding their partner’s hand, both on the physiological level and in the higher functions of the brain. For instance, the hypothalamus, which controls the release of cortisol—the hormone that regulates stress—showed closer-to-normal levels of activity in this last scenario.

  In short: holding a spouse’s hand actually helped the study participants regulate their emotions, and scientists could see it happening inside their brains on the neurobiological level. This is important because when you can regulate yourself during a stressful or trying moment, scientists believe, you are better able to access the rational parts of your brain and problem-solve, instead of going into an emotional downward spiral.

  “The more emotionally aroused you are, oftentimes the harder it is for you to think. It becomes a really important thing to be able to down-regulate your emotional feelings if you’re having a rough time,” Coan told me the first time I interviewed him about his research. The spouse empathy experiment has been cited hundreds of times since he conducted it, an important signal that other scientists find the research groundbreaking. Coan has replicated his findings with broader and more representative samples of people.