Children 'born good'
ITN
ITN - Sunday, July 13 12:13 pm
Children between the ages of seven and 12 have a natural inclination to care, a study has found.
Scientists came to the conclusion after scanning the brains of 17 children shown animations of people suffering pain.
The aim was to see whether the children, like most adults, showed evidence of empathy in their neural circuits.
Empathy, the ability to understand what another person is suffering, is marked by heightened activity in parts of the brain that process pain responses.
The group of nine girls and eight boys taking part in the study were shown animations in which only people's hands or feet were visible.
In one, pain occurred accidentally, such as when a heavy bowl fell on a person's hands.
Another showed situations where pain was inflicted deliberately, for instance by stepping on someone's foot.
Scans showed which parts of the children's brains were activated as they looked at the images.
When the pain was accidental, activity increased in several neural circuits involved in pain processing, but when the children saw animations depicting someone being hurt deliberately, regions of the brain involved in social interaction and moral reasoning also lit-up.
Chief researcher Professor Jean Decety, from the University of Chicago, said: "This study is the first to examine in young children both the neural response to pain in others and the impact of someone causing pain to someone else.
"Consistent with previous functional MRI studies of pain empathy with adults, the perception of other people in pain in children was associated with increased haemodynamic (blood flow) activity in the neural circuits involved in the processing of first-hand experience of pain."
The scientists believe empathy programming is "hard-wired" into the brains of normal children and is not entirely the product of parental guidance or other nurturing.
Researching empathy in children could help uncover the root causes of bullying or other kinds of anti-social behaviour, according to the scientists.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/itn/20080713/tuk-children-born-good-dba1618.html
― Tuomas, Sunday, 13 July 2008 14:27 (seventeen years ago)