Children raised in abusive households suffer not only from episodes of violence and harm but also from the unpredictability of when the next abuse will happen. Unpredictability is corrosive to coping, as we are not able to relax but must maintain our stress response in a state of high alert. This will produce long-term disruption of the HPA system, which can have consequences many years later. This may be one reason why PTSD sufferers have abnormal patterns of circulating cortisol, because their HPA remains on high alert and is unable to relax.23 In a study reminiscent of Bowlby’s original work, Finnish scientists followed up 282 children evacuated during World War II to test the effects of separation from parents on their stress responses decades later. Those separated from their parents during the war as young children had higher cortisol reactivity to stress tests sixty years after the early separation, indicating that the physiology of their HPA system had been altered permanently by this experience.24 The older the child was at the time of the evacuation, the more resilient they were and the less disruption to their HPA system as adults.
Even before you are born, stress can alter the functioning of the HPA axis. Female rhesus monkeys in the later stages of pregnancy were taken from their cages and exposed to unpredictable, loud, stress-inducing noise. After giving birth, not only did these young mothers have disrupted HPA responses, but so did their offspring, in comparison to other mothers who had not been stressed during pregnancy or their infants.25 In the same way, experiencing a terrifying, unpredictable event like the attack on the World Trade Center in which no one knew what was going on, some pregnant mothers may have inadvertently passed on a legacy of fear to their unborn children.
Once born, the long-lasting effects of early exposure to stressful households have been shown to alter the way babies respond to aggression even when they are not awake.26 Infants between six and twelve months of age had their brains scanned when they were asleep inside an fMRI scanner. They were played nonsense sentences spoken in very angry, mildly angry, happy and neutral tones of voice by a male adult. Even though they were unconscious, those babies from households where there were high levels of conflict showed greater reactivity to the very angry voice in the ACC, caudate, thalamus and hypothalamus – all brain regions of the HPA system. Already their stress response had become sensitized to the presence of aggression.
The HPA system is also altered in animals that become domesticated. As we saw earlier, domestication produces changes in behaviour and the brain. Domesticated animals are less fearful, less aggressive and have elevated levels of serotonin27 – a neurotransmitter associated with prosocial activity.28 Normally wild fox pups become fearful of humans at around forty-five days and are less likely to explore their environments as their natural fight-or-flight response kicks in. In contrast, this fearful response is not observed in domesticated pups of the same age and they continue to explore their environments. For domesticated foxes, the period of socialization is significantly longer and play activity extends into adulthood.29
Don’t feel nervous, feel excited!
The relationship between body and mind is critical to understanding emotion. One of the first accounts of this relationship was William James’s proposal that emotions were produced by the body’s response to a stressful encounter.30 When we see a bear, our fight-or-flight response immediately kicks in to deal with the threat and only afterwards do we feel the emotion of fear. That’s the way it should be, as a good evolutionary strategy, because it is better to act first and ask questions later when you are in potential danger. James argued that we needed to react before we had time to ponder the situation. You don’t want to be sitting around considering how you feel about the bear.
Most of us rarely encounter bears in the modern world, but we have all had that act-now, think-later experience. Maybe it was a sudden fright when someone jumped out at you or possibly an unexpected threat. Our heart rate and breathing surges as adrenaline pumps around our body in preparation. Road rage is a classic aggression scenario triggered by a perceived threat before we have had time to evaluate the actual threat.
James’s account of emotions following responses failed to take into consideration situations where the body responds more slowly to stressful situations than our thought processes.31 Also, people are not always sensitive to the changes in their body in stressful situations. Sometimes emotions can precede bodily changes, which is why we can feel embarrassment before we blush. Maybe you burped in public accidentally, looked around at others and then felt your cheeks burning bright red with heat as the emotional significance of your faux pas sunk in. The thought was almost immediate but the change in blood flow took longer. So which is it? Does fleeing cause fear or do we run away because we are frightened?
The answer is both. In some situations, the need to respond as fast as possible trumps the need to think (the sudden bear attack), whereas in others we need to consider the situation and respond accordingly (blushing in public). However, in both situations, experience and expectations play a role. If we know that the bear is actually stuffed, then we are less likely to be frightened. If we are among family when we burp, we do not feel so socially awkward.
As these different examples reveal, there are fast and slow pathways to emotion that depend on the circumstances and how we interpret the situation.32 Our emotions are also largely influenced by others. In a classic study of the importance of social context,33 naïve subjects were given an injection of adrenaline and told they were receiving vitamins that would boost performance on a visual test. This was all a sham to get at the real purpose of the study – how do those around us influence emotional experiences? Some of the participants were correctly informed that the injection would make their hands tremble, give them a flushed face and increase their heart rate. Others were told incorrect symptoms of a mild headache and itching skin.
While the participants sat around in the waiting room, they were asked to fill out mood questionnaires. Seated among them was an experimenter who acted in one of two ways. This confederate had not been injected with adrenaline but behaved either negatively, complaining about the study, or positively, by saying how much they were enjoying the experience and acting up playfully.
Meanwhile, in the real participants, the adrenaline triggered their HPA axis and produced the bodily symptoms associated with the fight-or-flight response. Suddenly they had these sensations, but what did they make of them? Those who had been warned correctly about the effects of adrenaline interpreted their sensations correctly (‘I’m feeling a little revved up because of the shot’). But those who did not expect the increased heart rate and tremors were in a state of ignorance and needed to make sense of the signals their bodies were sending them. This is where others play a critical role. The emotions experienced by the naïve participants depended on the influence of the stooge in the room. Those seated with the playful experimenter rated their mood much more positive compared to those seated with the irritated experimenter. They were using the social context of others to interpret their own bodily sensations. Whether we are enjoying a rock concert, a football game or a day at the funfair, our emotional experience depends heavily on how others respond.
The importance of interpretation explains why some of us feel anxious and some of us feel excited. We learn to interpret situations based on experiences that we accumulate over our lifetime. This is why children raised in an environment where there is excessive conflict come to expect this as normal. If there is one thing that is predictable in conflict households, it is anger. When there is anger, violence soon follows, which is why abused children tend to see anger earlier in faces and interpret faces as being angrier whereas they show no higher sensitivity for other emotional expressions. Having a bias for interpreting anger means that children can be prepared for fight-or-flight.