Effects of child abuse can last a lifetime: Watch the "still face"€™ experiment to see why

Brigid Schulte, The Washington Post

This Washington Post article highlights the findings from the National Academy of Science's first major report on child abuse and neglect that found that advances in brain research now show that child abuse and neglect damages not only in the way a developing child’s brain functions, but changes the actual structure of the brain itself, in such a way that makes clear thinking, controlling emotions and impulses and forming healthy social relationships more difficult.

This article features a link to a video of an experiment conducted by a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts, called the "still face experiment", in which a parent interact at first normally with their infant and suddenly stops doing so for a period of 2 minutes, staring at the infant with a still face. The video records the reaction by the infant. 

The article reports that recent studies have found that four-month-old infants exposed to the "still face" will remember it two weeks later, rapidly showing physiological changes to negative responses that infants exposed to it for the first time do not. It discusses the implications of the experiement and the findings from the National Academy of Science's research and links to studies of infants at orphanages who are fed and clothed, but not held, talked to or played with have found that some neglected children, literally, fail to grow.