Violence and Children's Brains

When children are exposed to violence in the family, their brains are visibly changed. That’s the disturbing message of new research published in tomorrow’s issue of Current Biology.

According to the research article, exposure to violence at home can “represent a form of environmental stress that significantly increases [the] risk of later psychopathology, including anxiety.” It’s as if violence tunes the child’s brain to expect more violence.

Earlier studies have shown that physically abused children show “selective hypervigilance to angry cues,” such as pictures of angry faces. Another earlier study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show increased brain reactivity. When individuals with anxiety disorder where shown angry faces, two brain regions were overly reactive: the anterior insula (AI) and the amygdala. The same response was found in soldiers exposed to combat.

The new research takes this a step further. Children exposed to family violence, including violence between parents, also showed the same increased brain reactivity. The reaction was quite specific in that they responded to pictures of angry faces, not sad faces.

Most important, perhaps, is that this study looked at brain function rather than symptoms of anxiety or depression. In terms of behavior, the children seemed quite normal. Their brains, however, tell a different story, one of being tuned to be anxious.

Some might suggest that given all the violence in the world, the reaction is beneficial. Maybe it’s a good thing that some human beings learn to be especially responsive to potential threats.

But as the researchers note, excessive reactivity “may also constitute a latent neurobiological risk factor increasing vulnerability to psychopathology.” The researchers also found that the degree of the brain reactivity depended on the severity of the violence.

The research “underlines the importance of taking seriously the impact for a child of living in a family characterized by violence. Even if such a child is not showing overt signs of anxiety or depression, these experiences still appear to have a measurable effect at the neural level,” said Eamon McCrory of University College London, lead author, in a press release from the journal.

More than that, this research shows how violence and trauma affect human beings in ways that permanently alter the brain.

The article, “Heightened Neural Reactivity to Threat in Child Victims of Family Violence,” appears in the December 6 issue of Current Biology.

For previous work by some of these same researchers, see “The Impact of Childhood Maltreatment: A Review of Neurobiological and Genetic Factors,” published in July in Frontiers in Psychiatry.

Seminaries and Science

How can seminaries do a better job in helping future clergy become more aware of developments in science and technology?

That was the focus of a panel last week at the American Academy of Religion Meeting in San Francisco. Lead-off speakers were Dan Aleshire, Director of the Association of Theological Schools and Jennifer Wiseman, who directs the program of Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Then it was my turn. I pointed out the obvious. There’s no room in the theological curriculum to add anything. Faculty wouldn’t know what to add if they had the time. Students would be able integrate it into what they are already learning. So why bother?

I suggested that seminaries need to remember that their job is to teach theology. Doing our job well today, I argued, means that we have to take science and technology into account. One reason why this is so is because theological ideas or doctrines come mixed with outdated philosophical notions of nature.

For Christianity, this is a real challenge. Our core idea—redemption—is built on a myth of an original human nature that is lost and then restored. Unless students are minimally aware of how science challenges this thinking, seminaries aren’t doing their job.

I also suggested that for today’s students, my classroom references to current science almost always brought the subject matter to life. Students today are not so familiar with philosophy or other sources of criticism of theology. They have an easier time understanding how science challenges traditional ideas and forces them to think. They welcome the challenge. After all, they like to think that their education is relevant to the world in which they will serve.

Seminaries today need to focus on the basics—like theology—and teach it the right way right from the beginning, starting with introductory courses.

Sure, advanced electives are fine. I teach them myself, everything from “Christianity and Evolution” to “Ethics and the Technologies of Human Enhancement.” But the real key for seminaries, I believe, is to teach the core of the curriculum in a way that is appropriate for the clergy of today.

Here's where you'll find more about the AAAS program on seminary education, including recent news about an earlier program.

Science and Human Mystery

I have been reading Bernard McGinn, a foremost expert on the history of Christian spirituality and mystical theology. In a recent essay, he comments on “the importance of recognizing the mystery of human existence.”

In Christian theology, the mystery of the human is grounded in the mystery of God. In the fourth century, St. Gregory of Nyssa observed that human beings are in the image of God. Our nature mirrors God’s nature. If God is inexhaustible mystery, then what we are must always remain a mystery to ourselves. Otherwise, our knowledge of ourselves would serve as something of a key for us to figure God out, a kind of theological Rosetta stone.

What does this have to do with recent science? Some think that science finds facts and dissolves mysteries. McGinn suggests as much. He thinks that theology’s insistence on human mystery serves as a useful check on the de-mystifying pretensions of science.

I agree with McGinn about the theology of essential human mystery. But I disagree that science has a tendency to erase mystery. Sure, many people see science that way. But look again. The more we learn about human origins, the more we find that any clear notion of a distinct human species seems to unravel. The more scientists merge human and nonhuman organisms or blur the distinction between human and machine, the more we make ourselves mysterious.

If I am right, science increases mystery. At least that’s what I tried to suggest in the brief article I contributed to Science last February. For more, see my post for October 12, below.

That’s why I think McGinn is not quite right when he say this:

“If God is the ultimate mystery, man’s image-nature implies an essentially negative horizon, or limit, to all that can be scientifically discovered about humanity, however original, illuminating, and productive these findings may be. From this viewpoint, growing scientific information (i.e. more and more facts) about human nature (biological, psychological, and sociological) will always be limited by the realization that the true meaning of human existence rests in its status as an inexhaustible mystery. Scientific contributions to the deeper understanding of human nature are welcome and often useful in the task of human self-realization, but they take on a different color when viewed from the sapiential perspective of the “learned ignorance” (docta ignorantia) that recognizes the limits of what can be known and quantified about humanity. This recognition of the limits of science may not be an easy message for contemporaries to appreciate, enamored as we are by the amazing discoveries about homo sapiens made during the past century; but it is one of the most significant challenges that image dei anthropology offers to the present.”

McGinn’s essay is entitled “Humans as Imago Dei: Mystical Anthropology Then and Now.” It appears in Sources of Transformation: Revitalising Christian Spirituality, 2010.