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Dr. Joachim Müllner (Psychiatrist)
Banned in France since 2019, ordinary educational violence is unfortunately still commonly used by some parents in the education of their child. While the negative effects of these methods on health and behavior are well known, little is known about how they affect neurocognitive systems. An American study is interested in the question.
Spanking, slaps, blows but also mockery or humiliation… Ordinary educational violence, whether physical or psychological, is still too often used by some parents to educate their children. They are not without physical and cognitive consequences, according to a study conducted by American researchers.
A study of 149 adolescents in 3 stages
To understand the impact of this violence on children, the authors of this work selected 149 volunteers aged 11 to 14 years. The scientists assessed the corporal punishment experienced by adolescents via a standardized scale.
In addition, adolescents were subjected to tasks, for which they were rewarded or not. Objective: to assess how they perceive the negative feeling linked to an error and the positive feeling following a reward. For this, they passed these tests while being connected by brain electrodes to “read” their neuronal responses on an electroencephalogram (EGG).
Finally, the adolescents were also subjected to measures of anxiety and depressive feelings.
The more children experience violence, the greater the risk of depression
Result: adolescents who experienced the most corporal punishment had higher negative feelings and lower reward satisfaction. For the researchers, corporal punishment seems to “potentiate” the neural response to errors and decrease the neural response to rewards, which leads to a higher risk of anxiety and depressive symptoms.
The opinion of Joachim Müllner, psychiatrist and member of the committee of experts of Doctissimo
“This article shows that people who experienced corporal punishment in childhood have more intense than average brain responses to making a mistake, and less intense than average brain responses to completing a task. This illustrates and perfectly specifies what has been identified so far, to see new behaviors appear, and therefore the disappearance of certain others” first indicates the psychiatrist.
“Indeed, positive reinforcement of behaviors that you want to see continue works better than negative reinforcement of behaviors that you want to see disappear. For example, if you say to someone ‘stop thinking about the bear white”, his brain will think of “the white bear”.
Whereas if you propose another thought, a fortiori pleasant or likely to be interesting for the person, you will increase the probability much more that the person stops thinking about “the polar bear”. The same goes for behaviors. concludes the specialist.