Lecture 3 Flashcards
(30 cards)
1
Q
What is the sensitisation hypothesis?
A
- Adverse events sensitise HPA systems = more reactive to stress, pattern of hyper-reactivity
- Lowering of threshold to trigger a stress response
- Internalising problems linked
2
Q
Internalising problems?
A
- Anxiety, depression etc
- Feeling excluded
3
Q
What is the attenuation hypothesis?
A
- Chronic stress dampens HPA reactivity through habituation which compromises development and increases risk to developing externalising problems because of reduced reactivity to stress and elevation of threshold to trigger a stress response
- Individuals can develop an over sensitive or an under sensitive systems over the same adversity
4
Q
Externalising problems?
A
- Issues with hyperactivity
- Behavioural problems, impulsivity and violent
5
Q
What did Moffit do? (1993)
A
- H-crime curve based on evidence of the increased participation in antisocial behaviour linked to age
- Not easy for young child, large increase in adolescents, reduction as people get older
- Other trend is the life course persistent trajectory: starts in childhood, if you start before the onset of puberty, you are at high risk of staying on that trajectory for the rest of life = not very prevalent around 10%
- Defined by low IQ with low heart rate and a criminogenic lifestyle and background - not neuropsychological but a maturity gap
- Friction between social norms/restrictions and physicality of adult causes young people to look up to role models who dare to rebel
- That is why when you are 18, less likely to engage in criminal behaviour as friction goes away
6
Q
What is the continuity and persistence?
A
- 40-70% of children with severe conduct problems become antisocial adults
- Costly intervention programs are only modestly successful and proceed on the basis of insufficient understanding of causal processes
- Recommends parenting programs that focus on improving parenting skills and child-parent relationships = individual differences are also seen in effectiveness of parenting interventions
7
Q
What are types of antisocial behaviours in children?
A
- Aggression and cruelty towards people and animals
- Bullying/fighting
- Destruction, vandalism
- Deceitfulness, theft, lying
- Truancy, running away
- Disobedience
- Easily annoyed, angry
- No remorse
8
Q
What are the subcategories of antisocial behaviour?
A
- Mental disorders: Conduct disorder, ODD (can move to serious form), Disruptive behaviour disorder, ADHD = tend to be precursors of ASPD
- Criminal perspective: violence, criminality, offenders
- Psychology: aggression, callous-unemotional or psychopathic traits
9
Q
What is the neurodevelopmental perspective?
A
- Children with conduct problems are not products of bad environments: changing env does not always improve conditions and some children are more at risk
- Some children with CP are inherently difficult children
- Problems of CP children may be related to neurobiological/psychological functioning
- Difficult temperament = possibility of antisocial child
10
Q
What are key emotional mechanisms that influence violence in adult psychopaths?
A
- Issues in prefrontal cortex and amygdala
- Fearlessness: engage in behaviours others would not
- Emotion recognition problems
- No empathy, remorse or guilt
- Poor Executive Functioning
- Poor emotion regulation
11
Q
What is the underarousal perspective?
A
- Low neurophysiological (ANS) resting levels
- Easily bored
- Elevated threshold for stress
- High need for sensation seeking and risky/adventurous activities
12
Q
What is the fearlessness perspective?
A
- Low neurophysiological (ANS/HPA) reactivity to adverse effects
- Punishment insensitivity and poor socialisation = explains difference between right/wrong
13
Q
What is the psychophysiology of antisocial behaviour?
A
- Lower arousal via
- Heart rate, SCR, EEG, affective startle response, cortisol stress response
14
Q
What was a study looking at if low HR was a biological marker for aggression?
A
- Sampled 1795 3yo
- Resting HR assessed for 1 min
- Aggressive behaviour assessed via CBCL in 1130 children at age 11
- Low heart rate at age 3 predisposes to aggression at age 11
- Kids who were aggressive at age 11 had lower HR at 3
- Kids with low HR at 3yo were more aggressive at age 11
15
Q
What was a study looking at infant fearlessness a risk factor for aggression? (Robot)
A
- Looking at fear temperament:
- Fear exposure to a robot who made a noise and maternal separation
- Measures psychophysiology
- Cries when approaches but stops when robot withdraws
- Measured skin conductance as not changed by movement of child = the lower level of skin conductance (less fear and upset), higher rated for aggressive behaviours by mothers = nothing else in first year of life predicted this
16
Q
What was a study looking at if low ANS arousal can predict criminal behaviour? (Teen boys)
A
- 101 15yo school boys looking at resting HR and SC fluctuations
- Looked at who was guilt and sentenced at age 24
- 77% of non-criminals and 65% of criminalised were correctly classified based on psychophysiological variables alone
- BUT 23% were false-positive (non-crim identified as crim)
- 35% were false-negative (crim. Identified as non-crim)
17
Q
What is the startle reflex?
A
- Dysfunctions in amygdala give rise to reduced augmentation of the startle reflex by visual threat primes
- Startle reflex is modulated by affective content
- In adult psychopaths, they show a low startle to positive stimuli, a much higher startle response in neutral, and lower startle in negative stimuli, controls show a gradual linear incline
18
Q
What was a study looking at startle and fearlessness in CD children?
A
- Children with higher levels of conduct problems had lower startle amplitudes specifically when looking at negative slides
- Huge differences between CD children and Normal children
19
Q
What are executive domains of functioning, and behavioural problems of dysfunction?
A
- Planning: reckless&impulsive
- Working memory: bad decisions, not learning from mistakes, living in here and now
- Inhibition: rigidity and inability to change
- Set-shifting: Poor self-control
- Decision Making: reactive or impulsive aggression, repeated offending
20
Q
What are typical EF tests?
A
- Wisconsin Card Sorting Test: select right response, rule changes after a time
- Memory test
- Stroop test: inhibition
- Tower of London: planning task
- Very little problems with EF with CD - only difficult task was gambling/decision making task
21
Q
What is the one-pack card playing task?
A
- Show deck of cards
- Ask ppts if they want to play, if black = win money, red = lose money
- Do not tell how long they can play it, have rewarding winners than losers, probability of the winners is decreasing, and losers increasing
- When most people monitor what is going on, they stop playing about midway (50 vs 50)
- OFC and PFC and CD issues have issues with this behaviour (near the end 97 losses vs 3 wins)
- Children with anxiety will stop too early and will not expose self to what is possible
- Hyper-sensitivity to rewards and Insensitivity to punishments and future consequences
- Failure to learn from mistakes
- Cannot detect of altered contingencies = because of impaired error detection due to reduced punishment sensitivity
22
Q
What causes neurobio/psych impairments in children with antisocial behaviour?
A
- Epigenetic influences = how adversity runs in families
- Pre/postnatal adversity
- Early temperamental difficulties
- Parenting (poor monitoring, domestic abuse)
23
Q
How can this research inform intervention?
A
- Early years are crucial: early experiences foster learning, brain developing and social relationships
- Early intervention leads to better long term outcomes than intervention support delivered later in life
- No one approach but tailored interventions
- Targeting neuropsych and neurobio deficits e.g emotional/cognitive, neurofeedback/medication
24
Q
What is the Cardiff Emotion Recognition Training (CERT)
A
- Form of intervention: children have problems recognising emotionality of faces, children with internalising anxiety etc, might overestimate people being sad, girls develop this quicker
- Looked at young offenders and looked at emotion recognition before and after training in both groups, as well as number and severity of offences committed in 6mo before and after emotional training
- The training had a significant effect on the emotional training, and saw an improvement - in fewer serious crimes being committed - less human interactions - fewer interpersonal crimes
2) New sample: children at high-risk for future criminal behaviour via family mental health or DV - Not every child with problems have emotion recognition issues
- Children that did = recognised happy faces, but had issues interpreting other faces - children improved
3) Teachers rated these children above without knowing who was in what set - Those children who did not have emotion recognition did not improve, but those who did were rated better by teachers
25
What were the environmental influences on ASB?
- Violence breeds violence
- Disadvantaged environments linked to early emotional problems
- Cross-generational stability due to shared env and individual traits
26
What are the genetic contributions to ASB?
- Genetic factors
- Candidate genes
- GWAS
- Polygenic risk score
- COMT gene linked to ASB in ADHD = emotional functioning mediates this
27
What is the gene-env interactions for ASB?
Diathesis stress and social push - genes influence stronger in low-risk environment, env dominates in high-risk
28
What is emotional functioning in ASB?
- Impaired fear recognition, reduced startle response
- Reduced empathy
- Poor emotion recognition: social difficulties and maltreatment history
29
What are the types of empathy and ASB?
- Cognitive empathy = understanding others' emotions
- Affective empathy = sharing others' emotions
- ASB is linked to impaired affective empathy and intact cognitive empathy
- Reduced heart rate/SCL to others' distress
- ASB associated with EF deficits, in inhibition, greater deficits in hot EF (emotion-related decision making)
30
How to prevent ASB and intervene early?
- Neuroplasticity is highest in early childhood
- Interventions can rewire emotional and cognitive systems
- Prenatal care programs reduced juvenile delinquency
- Health/nutrition interventions = reduced criminal offending by 34%
