A new study reveals that children who have experienced interpersonal violence or abuse process caregiver signals differently in their brain compared to those with no such experience. The research found that a history of threat experiences is linked to heightened activity in the insula, a region involved in sensing bodily internal state and determining what’s important in the environment. This suggests that for these children, their parents are highly salient stimuli, triggering an extra allocation of resources to process their presence. Understanding this neural pattern can inform better interventions and potentially predict later mental health issues such as anxiety or depression.
Source: https://www.psypost.org/childhood-trauma-changes-how-the-brain-processes-caregiver-cues