母爱对孩子大脑影响.doc

How a Mothers Love Changes a Childs Brain Joseph Castro, LiveScience Staff Writer Date: 30 January 2012 Time: 03:01 PM ET Nurturing a child early in life may help him or her develop a larger hippocampus, the brain region important for learning, memory and stress responses, a new study shows. Previous animal research showed that early maternal support has a positive effect on a young rats hippocampal growth, production of brain cells and ability to deal with stress. Studies in human children, on the other hand, found a connection between early social experiences and the volume of the amygdala, which helps regulate the processing and memory of emotional reactions. Numerous studies also have found that children raised in a nurturing environment typically do better in school and are more emotionally developed than their non-nurtured peers. Brain images have now revealed that a mother’s love?physically affects the volume of her child’s hippocampus. In the study, children of nurturing mothers had hippocampal volumes 10 percent larger than children whose mothers were not as nurturing. Research has suggested a link between a larger hippocampus and better memory. We can now say with confidence that the psychosocial environment has a material impact on the way the human brain develops, said Dr. Joan Luby, the studys lead researcher and a psychiatrist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Mo. It puts a very strong wind behind the sail of the idea that early nurturing of children positively affects their development. The research is part of an ongoing project to track the development of children with early onset depression. As part of the project, Luby and her colleagues previously measured the maternal support that children — who were ages 3 to 6 and had either symptoms of depression, other psychiatric disorders or no mental health problems — received during a so-called waiting task. The researchers placed mother and child in a room along with an attr