Acute guilt in childhood can be a precursor to depression in adulthood.
Guilt and depression are directly related. And it’s not just that during periods of depression, many feel guilty – often without any serious reason. If a child experienced acute feelings of guilt in childhood, this may be a harbinger of a propensity for depression in adulthood. This pattern was confirmed and explained by psychologists and neurophysiologists at Washington University in St. Louis (USA). For 12 years, they observed the emotional development of 145 children, periodically scanning the electrical activity of their brains. A region known as the anterior insula has attracted researchers’ attention, and its activity is associated with intuition, self-awareness, and emotional expression. The study showed a direct and pronounced correlation between the size of this area and the strength of the feeling of guilt: the more painfully, acutely and often the children experienced it, the smaller the anterior insular lobe of the large brain they had.
Until now, it was believed that the small size of this part of the brain is associated primarily with manifestations of anxiety, anxiety, behavioral disorders, and even schizophrenia. Thus, both excessively painful and frequent experiences of guilt in childhood and depression in adulthood may be the result of a purely anatomical structure of the brain. Neurophysiologists, however, are not yet ready to say whether this is so. It cannot be ruled out that constant childhood experiences of guilt affect the process of brain formation, slowing down the growth of the anterior insular lobe of the brain. The authors of the study are firmly convinced of one thing: parental practices based on cultivating guilt in children are a very bad idea.
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