This month's edition of Pediatrics magazine has a report about evaluating sexual behavior in children. It does not break any new ground, but offers an excellent overview of the current state of research into the range of child sexual behaviors. It notes, for example, the connection with parental neglect, as well as witnessing domestic violence.
The researchers studied the formation of memories in two populations -- women who recovered memories of abuse after suggestive therapy techniques and those who recovered memories spontaneously after external triggers. The study found that the women who recovered memories after suggestive therapy were more likely to form false memories of items presented during the study, while those with spontaneous recovery formed no more false memories than the control group. The study also found that people in the latter group were more likely to forget previous memories, and to think erroneously that their most recent memory was the first one.
The study had some inevitable limitations and its findings need to be replicated. Nevertheless, it is an important first step into understanding how recovered memories work, and how the triggering mechanism can affect, and even distort, memories.
Hat tip: Medical News Today
Legal blogs already are picking up on the study that I mentioned yesterday. The normally-solid Sexual Abuse Claims Blog quotes one report that "child abuse can permanently alter the way your genes fight stress, leaving victims of childhood abuse more vulnerable to stressful events throughout their life."
Let's all repeat one more time - the study looked at a grand total of 36 tissue samples. To quote a neurobiology professor, "The bottom line is that this is a terrific line of work, but there is a very long way to go either to understand the effects of early experience or the causes of mental disorders."
If you run across an expert who makes this claim about the results of childhood abuse, take a good look at the studies they are relying on. As one of my favorite literary characters said, "Wizards should know better."
News articles about a recently-published neurological study illustrate how easily a poorly-supported claim can become accepted dogma. The current issue of Nature Neuroscience reports a study of the brain tissue of people who had died under varying circumstances. They found significant differences in the brains of people who had suffered abuse as children.
Numerous news agencies reported the study, announcing breathlessly that child abuse "permanently alters" how the brain responds to stress, that child abuse alters the brain, and that child abuse "causes lifelong changes" to the brain. The study, however, proved no such thing.
The study did raise interesting questions that need to be explored further. But its sampling was too limited to definitively establish anything. The researchers studied tissue from a total of 36 brains: 12 from suicide victims who had suffered abuse as children, 12 from suicide victims who had not suffered abuse, and 12 from people who had died of causes other than suicide. Such numbers are simply too small to prove anything other than the need for more research.
Only one article struck any sort of cautionary note, and that with a quotation at the very end:
“The bottom line is that this is a terrific line of work, but there is a very long way to go either to understand the effects of early experience or the causes of mental disorders,” Dr. Steven Hyman, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard, wrote in an e-mail message.
That statement should have been at the beginning of every report about the study.
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