Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Spanking remains common around the world, despite evidence linking corporal punishment to detrimental child outcomes. Children who were spanked exhibited greater activation in multiple regions of the medial and lateral prefrontal cortex PFC , including dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, dorsomedial PFC, bilateral frontal pole, and left middle frontal gyrus in response to fearful relative to neutral faces compared to children who were not spanked.
These findings suggest that spanking may alter neural responses to environmental threats in a manner similar to more severe forms of maltreatment. Corporal punishment—defined as the use of physical force to cause a child to experience pain or discomfort, however light— Convention on the Rights of the Child, , such as spanking, is a socially normative and legal punishment method in over countries Global Initiative to End Corporal Punishment of Children, Despite the high prevalence and widespread social approval of spanking, developmental theories have long posited that spanking is associated with deleterious child outcomes see Gershoff, More recently, some have argued that spanking may influence brain development in a similar manner as more extreme forms of maltreatment e.
These developmental consequences are posited to be at least somewhat distinct from those associated with adverse experiences involving deprivation, such as neglect and lack of cognitive and social stimulation.
Spanking and other forms of corporal punishment are threatening experiences that cause fear, pain, and threat of harm to the child Gershoff, Consequently, spanking may influence neurodevelopmental processes in similar ways as more severe forms of maltreatment. The dimensional model predicts that exposure to threatening experiences alters social and emotional processing in ways that facilitate the rapid identification of environmental threats, including heightened responses to negative emotional cues in the amygdala and other regions of the salience network McLaughlin et al.
Existing evidence from studies of harsh parenting and child abuse is consistent with this idea. Children exposed to physical and sexual abuse, domestic violence, or harsh parenting exhibit heightened neural responses to threatening or negative stimuli in the amygdala and broader salience network Gard et al.
