Lying faces

Abused kids are quick to detect anger -- even where there is none. Psychology professor Seth Pollak believes changing that reflex is crucial to healing.

By D. Yap

Nov. 21, 2002 | The map of child abuse can be obvious on a young body -- purple fingerprints on a pinched forearm, yellowed welts on the back, a hairline fracture in a wounded wrist.

The ravages on a child's psyche are murkier. Will a victim grow to be timid? Angry? Unfocused? Suicidal? Why do some abused children revisit violence on their own children while others manage to become loving parents?

Some of these questions remain unanswered, but the psychological damage may be more specific than we have imagined. A new generation of researchers relying on controlled experiments and current technology have begun to discern abuse's path through the physiology of the brain.

Seth Pollak, an assistant professor of psychology, psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has found in his cutting-edge experiments that abuse so profoundly alters the mechanism of the mind that the perception of reality itself is notably different for abused children than for the rest of us.

Pollak and colleague Doris Kistler found in a recent study that children with a history of abuse tended to interpret ambiguous facial expressions as angry far more frequently than a control group of children.

In the experiment, set up as a computer game, 40 children aged 8 to 10 years old were asked to categorize the emotions of a series of digitally morphed faces expressing varying degrees of happiness, fear, sadness and anger. While the children generally responded the same to faces showing mostly happiness, sadness or fear, abused children identified more of the ambiguous faces as being angry, rather than fearful or sad. In an earlier experiment, Pollak found that brain wave activity increased when abused children viewed images of angry faces.

Pollak theorizes that abused children adapt to their dangerous environments by developing a kind of early warning system -- a hypersensitivity to any possible signals of anger -- that helps them avoid injury. "I think people become hypersensitive to the emotions that are most salient or significant in their lives," says Pollak.

It's an excellent survival mechanism; the trouble is that children who continue to interpret benign signals as threatening in all situations -- even outside an abusive relationship -- may react inappropriately and trigger major social problems the rest of their lives. Pollak believes the trick is to teach these children how to change their response when they're free of their abusers.

Pollak spoke to Salon recently from his office in Madison about his experiments, the canny coping mechanisms of children, the ways we can help abused children, and what troubles his grad students.

How is your work different from others studying abused children?

Typically, child abuse is seen as a psycho-social child development problem. We're recasting it as a problem of brain development. Instead of looking at child abuse just as a social problem, we're really looking at this problem from the perspective of the brain systems involved in perceiving information from the world. And we're conducting experiments -- controlled experiments -- to do so.

We're learning about things we wouldn't have seen without these approaches -- things like specific ways in which children are perceiving faces. If we just asked them to tell stories, or observed how long they sat on a parent's lap, we wouldn't get this kind of information.

You showed the children facial expressions depicting varying degrees of happiness, sadness, fear and anger. How does a face communicate an emotion?

It's a wild process. We think of recognizing a facial expression as easy. And in fact, even very young infants can do it. But the process of recognizing a face is actually very complex. You must first perceive all of the different patterns of muscle activation in a face -- mouth, eyes, forehead, cheeks, eyebrows -- and then somehow put all of those different muscle movements together. Then you need to relate that pattern to other times you have seen it, to your previous experiences. Then you need to generate some sort of label to identify it. In many cases you need to relate what you are seeing to the context. It's amazing that the human brain can do this in milliseconds.

In other studies, you measured children's brain waves as a way to understand how they recognize emotions.

We had wires attached to the children's heads in a soundproof room. If I had children actually on the playground, I couldn't get those kinds of measurements. Most researchers have gone more naturalistic, less about the biology. We need both.

Why did you look specifically for reactions to anger?

We chose to focus on anger because my theory is that young children can't attend to everything that's going on around them, and because of that, they have to be selective. They have to attend to the most salient things in their environment.

There are a number of emotions that an abused child could see a lot of -- like fear or sadness. But I think if you had to focus on just one emotion, anger would be your best bet. By the time you notice someone is feeling scared, an abusive experience has already begun, something scary is happening. But noticing that an adult is becoming angry might allow a bit of extra time to prepare for a violent episode.

Also, abusive parents are not always hostile. It could be very difficult to pick an abusive parent out of a crowd. The problem is that these people tend to have the proverbial short fuse. They can be interacting with their kids normally and then become very hostile in a sudden or extreme way. In a way, these parents are very unpredictable.

In our experiments, normally treated kids responded as one would expect -- similarly to anger, sadness, all those basic emotions. The physically abused kids only differed in the response to anger, both in their sensitivity or ability to detect emotions and in their brain activity. But they all looked the same when they were responding to other emotions.

In the past, most research on child maltreatment simply listed all of the problems and deficits these kids have, without acknowledging what may be an adaptive aspect to their behavior. I have a totally different take. I think the abused kids are doing what you would want them to do.

How is it a good thing?

What made it a really interesting study was that these kids are picking up on something that really matters in their lives. If I had done this experiment and the abused kids had generally performed worse, that wouldn't have been interesting because that would have been just another example of the things maltreated kids can't do.

In the past, the literature has really focused on all the problems these kids have. The argument that I want to make is that I think you have to look at this as an illustration of both adaptation and maladaptation. When these kids are living in these hostile home environments that are abusive, then this hypervigilance is adaptive in letting the kids survive and cope.

This is a skill that kids carry everywhere. The difference is context. At school, these kids are with kids who aren't hurting them, teachers who aren't abusing them. So the idea here is the strategy. Processes that work very well in one context, when a child changes context, in a place where people aren't harming them, all of a sudden that doesn't work.

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