Corporal or physical punishment is widely used in both homes and schools around the world. Approximately 60% of children aged 2-14 years are subjected to physical punishment on a regular basis by their parents or other caregivers. Almost all students in some countries report being physically punished by school staff. Physical punishment is equally likely for boys and girls, as well as children from wealthy and impoverished families.
Don’t spank your children. That’s the conventional wisdom emerging from decades of research linking corporal punishment to a decline in adolescent health and negative behavioral effects, such as an increased risk of anxiety and depression. A new study looks at how corporal punishment affects neural systems to produce those negative effects.
Corporal punishment is simply defined as the “intentional infliction of physical pain by any means for the purpose of punishment, correction, discipline, instruction, or any other reason.” This violence, especially when perpetrated by a parent, elicits a wide range of emotional responses. The researchers, led by Kreshnik Burani, MS, and working with Greg Hajcak, Ph.D., at Florida State University, wanted to understand the neural underpinnings of that experience and its consequences.
Elsevier published the study in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.
Using EEG, this study provides new insights into the mechanisms that may underpin the adverse effects of corporal punishment on mental health in children, as well as the neural systems that may be affected.
Cameron Carter
The researchers conducted a longitudinal study on 149 boys and girls ages 11 to 14 from the Tallahassee, FL, area. Participants performed a video game-like task and a monetary guessing game while undergoing continuously recorded electroencephalography, or EEG – a noninvasive technique to measure brain-wave activity from the scalp. From the EEG data, the researchers determined two scores for each participant – one reflecting their neural response to error and the other reflecting their neural response to reward.
Two years later, participants and their parents completed a series of questionnaires to screen for anxiety and depression and to assess parenting style. As expected, kids who had experienced corporal punishment were more likely to develop anxiety and depression.
“First, we replicate the well-known negative effect of corporal punishment on a child’s well-being: we discovered that corporal punishment is associated with increased anxiety and depressive symptoms in adolescence. However, our findings suggest that corporal punishment may have an effect on brain activity and neurodevelopment” Burani stated.
This was reflected in the adolescents who received physical punishments by a larger neural response to error and a blunted response to reward.
“Specifically,” Burani added, “our paper links corporal punishment to increased neural sensitivity to making errors and decreased neural sensitivity to receiving rewards in adolescence. In previous and ongoing work with Dr. Hajcak, we see that increased neural response to errors is associated with anxiety and risk for anxiety, whereas the decreased neural response to rewards is related to depression and risk for depression. Corporal punishment, therefore, might alter specific neurodevelopmental pathways that increase the risk for anxiety and depression by making children hypersensitive to their own mistakes and less reactive to rewards and other positive events in their environment.”
“Using EEG, this study provides new insights into the mechanisms that may underpin the adverse effects of corporal punishment on mental health in children, as well as the neural systems that may be affected,” said Cameron Carter, MD, Editor of Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, of the findings.
