What happens when mothers don’t care or aren’t there – separation from Mum and the clinically depressed adult; lack of resilience to adversity and succumbing to social defeat; maternal violence and the intergenerational cycle of abuse.
Back in the middle of the twentieth century feminists got very angry with John and his attachment theory. ….. did experiments with monkey babies, taking some and giving them nice soft cloth cuddly surrogate ‘mothers’, and giving other babies just wire ‘mothers’ to cling to. The babies that had soft cuddly surrogate Mums fared a lot better in the sanity stakes than those unfortunates allocated to wire shapes for mothering. Feminists deemed …….as part of a conspiracy to lock women into the home, perceived as a jail. But the scientists’ views look far better as the basis for creating a society wherein all can be happily functioning adults….GS
[ The
NATURE / NURTURE
Today's topic:
• The nature / nurture
debate
• Animal research points to
blend
• 'Blank'
slate born quite full
• Human universals
The long debate over
heredity and environment -- whether "nature" or "nurture"
controls human development -- is over. Nature has won. And so has nurture.
In fact, heredity and
environment act on each other, and the resulting interactions help form a
personality. Animal studies suggest that an outside stimulus -- say, an
emotional trauma -- can actually cause physical changes in the animal's neural
circuitry. Simply put, what happens outside of you can alter what's happening
inside of you.
Clinical depression is a
classic example, says Dr. Beth Seelig, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst at
"How is it that
psychotherapy can work, because psychotherapy isn't a pill?" Seelig asked.
". . . The cause of depression is partly biological and partly
environmental, and the treatment of depression can be both. It's been shown
that, as a matter of fact, the most effective treatment combines a biological
approach and a psychotherapy approach."
Animal research
points to blend
Paul Plotsky is professor
of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at
In an extraordinary series
of experiments, Plotsky and his colleagues are seeking to break the cycle of
child abuse that is passed from one generation to the next among a certain
group of rhesus monkeys at Yerkes. In another, Plotsky has demonstrated how
emotional trauma among baby rats can lead to a fatal depressive state among
those rats as adults.
In a wide-ranging telephone
interview in late summer with the Journal-Constitution's Richard Halicks,
Plotsky discussed that research and what it says about the nature-nurture
debate. ("If you're going to argue the nature-nurture question, you're
barking up the wrong tree," he says. "Because genes don't unfold in a
vacuum, and nature doesn't happen on a blank slate. There's an
interaction.")
Here is an edited
transcript of Plotsky's remarks:
Plotsky: There's a population of rhesus monkeys [at
Yerkes] in which the mothers were observed to abuse their kids. Dario
Maestripieri, now at the
Q: I wasn't aware that that kind of behavior
manifested itself outside of humans.
A: People would probably like to believe that it
doesn't. But in our population, which is about 3,700 animals at the primate
center, about 2 percent of the females show this behavior. It is probably less
common in the wild, but no one really knows for sure. I have some incredible
video clips of aspects of this behavior, including some even more striking ones
showing how it seems to be passed from generation to generation.
Now, what we don't know is
whether the passing of this behavior is learned, genetic or whether it's both.
So . . . we've designed some cross-fostering studies, where you take infants
from identified bad lines of mothers and you give them to "good"
mothers to foster.
Q: The abuse you've observed is maternal behavior?
A: Yes, it appears to be, or perhaps it is
something about the nature of the mother-infant interaction. The fathers really
-- kind of like in rats, they're merely sperm donors. They don't stay around to
do much other than maybe harass the females occasionally.
Q: And this ranges all the way from throwing –
A: Throwing, stomping on them, pushing
them away when they try to have body contact or to nurse. The interesting thing
is that while the moms don't seem particularly interested in caring for their
own infants, they also don't want anybody else to touch them. So you also see
these, I guess what I can only call tug of wars, where a related animal, like a
grandmother in many cases, will come try to take care of an infant.
And the mother just
basically grabs it by the arm and the leg and there's a tug of war. These are
the video clips I have a hard time watching. In the end, these animals don't
get killed. They don't usually get severely injured -- occasionally there are
dislocations in shoulders or hips.
However, because often the
mother's not really interested in providing a lot of care, some of the infants
have to be taken to the nursery at night to be fed, so that they don't lose
weight and die. But by and large most of these animals do survive into
adulthood and reproduce.
The scary thing, as I look
at these videos . . . is I've seen an awful lot of human videos that look a lot
like these monkeys. Even in people who know they're being videoed. One of many
that is seared into my brain was from [a program at
We saw a video of a young
mother with about a 13-month-old infant. There was suspected abuse of the
infant from her boyfriend and possibly from her. She was referred from the
local department of family services for evaluation by this program. When she
arrived with her infant, she consented to being watched and videoed while she
played with her daughter.
She and her infant were
brought into this nice playroom with toys all around and just told to play
normally. She knew what was at stake, which was basically losing her infant to
foster care, at the least. And what you see is, initially, she actually looks
like a very responsive mom. She takes the infant to the center of this playroom
where there are lots of toys. And she sits down amidst the toys and they're
playing nicely.
Then there's this almost
imperceptible change in her demeanor. You can't really say quite what it is.
And she pulls her daughter back to her by her pigtails with one hand. With the
other hand she's rummaging around the toys, trying to find something. (Often
the toys are seeded with things of particular import to the case.) Then she
grabs a pair of plastic handcuffs, puts the kid's hands behind her, handcuffs
her, picks up the toy gun and starts shooting her.
This seems to go on for
tens of minutes, but I think it was probably about 90 seconds. The kid's in
hysterics. All of a sudden there's this change in the mother's demeanor again,
and she brings the kid back to her. [She's being] very soothing. She starts to
take off the handcuffs, and you think, "OK, it's over." Then she puts
the kid's hands in front of her, handcuffs her again, and does it again. All the time knowing that she's being videotaped and watched.
Now you tell me how this kid's going to grow up normally.
I've also seen way too much
video of the Romanian orphanages. I've worked with [Dr.] Patrick Mason
[director of the
What we'd like to do is
find out what kinds of changes occur in the brain of infants who experience
this sort of rearing, where basically there are either unstable or adverse
conditions. It's our feeling that the changes that occur in the fine wiring of
the nervous system as a result of these experiences basically render the individual
vulnerable to a whole host of medical and psychiatric illnesses later in life,
essentially making them less resilient to the everyday slings and arrows and
traumas that they may have to face.
All of this, of course,
happens on top of whatever genetic background the individual carries. This
background is also a player, so it is important to understand the interactions
between genes and environment. This takes us back to our cross-fostered
monkeys, where we now have lots of information on mother and infant behavior
and are slowly getting information on genes and small differences in genes. So
now it is just a waiting game for these infants to reach reproductive age and
have their own kids. [Plotsky explains that it takes 3 1/2 to four years for the
monkeys to reach sexual maturity and have their own offspring.] . . .
We're about halfway through
the wait period. So our hypothesis will be that the offspring that were
cross-fostered to "good" mothers, when they have their own infants,
will not show this kind of neglectful, abusive behavior, because we think that
a lot of this behavior is learned.
Paul Plotsky's experiments on "maternal
separation" among rats -- wherein a mother rat is removed from her infants
for up to three hours a day, beginning on day two after birth and continuing to
day 14 -- create a class of clinically depressed adult rodents.
Plotsky explains:
We'd go to meetings and
present the data on our rodent models, and people such as Charlie Nemeroff --
who's now the chair of psychiatry here and my boss -- would come up and say,
"You know, those animals sure look depressed."
And I'd say, "Oh, come
on."
So I went to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is the manual that psychiatrists use. It's a categorical listing -- these are the symptoms that go with this disease. . . .
So I said, "OK, fine:
If our rats really are a model for depression, then we ought to see how many of
the diagnostic criteria -- at least the ones that are applicable to nonhumans
-- might apply. We can look at body weight changes, we
can look at sleep patterns, locomotor patterns, cognitive function,
distractability.
We basically can't
determine whether out rats have inappropriate feelings of worthlessness and guilt,
and we can't ask them about suicidal ideation. [So] it turns out that our
maternally separated rats as adults in fact show every one of the diagnostic
criteria, except the two that we can't assess. And if you treat them as adults
with antidepressants . . . you see a reversal of everything that we can
measure, including levels of gene expression, changes in microarchitecture of
neurons and pathways.
We also know that if we
cross-foster animals, we know we can prevent the occurrence of this
symptomology. These
[maternally separated] rats represent a vulnerability model, and if you then
challenge them as adults, [they cannot cope]. Something that we do is called
"social defeat."
It's a resident-intruder
paradigm. You have a territorial male and a female living in a large cage
together. And you take the female out and drop in an intruder male. What
invariably happens in the rat world is they sniff each other. And then the
resident does a more or less mock attack on the intruder. And if the intruder
has an ounce of sense, he very quickly rolls over on this back, lets the
resident essentially put his foot on his chest, and essentially he exposes his
jugular and says, "OK, I know my position here. Leave me alone." And
that happens within 90 seconds of putting rats together. . . .
What we require for our
test is that the intruder show five continuous seconds of submissive behavior.
As soon as that happens, we take the intruder out. . . . The end result is
pretty typical. The intruder, once he experiences defeat, doesn't look very
good for about the next week. He loses weight, he stops grooming, his stress
hormone levels are elevated, often blood glucose is
elevated as well. He doesn't eat. His sleep microarchitecture is disrupted, if
you measure sleep EEG. This is just the experience of getting defeated. And
then, within about seven to 10 days, he recovers.
You take one of the
maternally separated rats and do this and basically, if you don't treat them
with antidepressants, they die. They never spontaneously recover. They just
don't eat, they get secondary infections, they lose
considerable amounts of weight.
Q: So what is known as "adverse early
experience" -- in this case, the rat's separation from its mother --
results in a vulnerable adult?
A: As long as you're not severely challenged in any
way, you don't have any problems. But if you are severely challenged, like in a
social defeat situation, which isn't atypical in the rat world, basically you
don't have the reserves to cope with it very well, and it pushes you over the
edge. . . .
Pretty
much most of the biological findings that have been reported in humans we can
replicate in this rat model. So it turns out to be a
fairly effective way to look at changes in the central nervous system.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Advertise
with us
By using ajc.com you accept the terms of our Visitor Agreement. Please read it.
Questions about your
privacy?
See our updated Privacy
Statement.
Interested in reprint permission? See our Permissions Policy.
© 2003 The