Supernormal. Мэг Джей
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of soldiers exhibited the same level of activity in the amygdala in response to the photos of angry faces—a universal threat cue. After deployment, the group of soldiers that had been to the war zone had increased activity in the amygdala, now showing a greater response to angry faces compared with the group that never saw combat.
Of course, it is not just war that makes our brains more sensitive. There are different ways of living in fear every day, and abusive siblings, alcoholic parents, dangerous neighborhoods, and school bullies are but a few examples of the different sorts of minefields children pick their way through every single day. Not surprisingly, we see the same sort of brain changes found in soldiers among children who live with violence. One study examined twenty children who had been exposed to family violence and twenty-three who had not. Like soldiers who had returned from war, children who had been exposed to violence in the home showed greater activity in the amygdala in response to photos of angry faces than did the children who had not lived with violence in the home, and the degree of activation was positively correlated with the severity of the violence seen. And it is not just violence that sensitizes the amygdala. Children separated from their mothers, or reared in orphanages or by depressed mothers, for example, have all been found to have larger amygdalae than their peers, perhaps because they grow accustomed to looking out for themselves.
If the best defense is a good offense, it would follow that, in a dangerous world, it is beneficial not just to react to a threat, but also to be able to detect it. Early detection confers the advantage of time, allowing us to be proactive or to get in front of our problems. So many children and teens, and their amygdalae, become skilled not only at responding to danger but also at seeing it coming their way.
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“Once you’ve been there long enough,” one soldier said of the war zone, “you start to know: That ain’t right. It’s like when you walk down your block. You know your neighborhood. And you know when things are normal.” What is normal for the resilient child? Children who do not live in average, expectable environments but in violent or unpredictable ones become adept at spotting warning signs. Like soldiers in combat, they are especially attuned to details in their surroundings, particularly those that suggest something “ain’t right.” Noticing when the environment is awry is a power that many resilient children possess relative to their peers, and even relative to their own other abilities. Supernormals like Jessie describe a hypersensitivity to danger—almost a sixth sense about it—and, indeed, research studies about threat detection suggest just that.
Preschoolers from troubled families are already paying closer attention to certain details than are their peers. One study looked at fourteen preschoolers who attended a therapeutic school, each of whom had been mistreated in some way. Some of the children had been physically or sexually abused, and others had witnessed domestic violence or been neglected. These preschoolers completed the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, also known as the WPPSI (pronounced whip-see). In this study, the overall IQ scores for the mistreated preschoolers were in the average range, suggesting that, in general, their intellectual abilities did not differ significantly from others their age. They did, however, perform better than same-aged peers on one subtest: Picture Completion. The Picture Completion subtest consists of drawn pictures of common objects or real-life situations that are missing something, like a door without a doorknob or a table without a leg. This subtest measures visual alertness and attention to detail, especially the ability to differentiate essential from nonessential details. Thirty percent of the mistreated preschoolers had Picture Completion scores that were significantly higher than average, or more than one standard deviation above the mean. While 10 percent of the general population performs better on Picture Completion than on other WPPSI subtests, nearly every mistreated preschooler performed best on this subtest.
Because the major predators of human beings are other human beings, among the most relevant cues that something is wrong, or is about to be, are the expressions on the faces of those around us. Charles Darwin argued that emotions are universal and that our survival depends on reading and reacting to them. Further research, most notably by Paul Ekman and Carroll Izard, has suggested that each of the six emotions understood the world over—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise—requires specific movements of facial muscles. We are wired through evolution to be sensitive to these expressions, and some children may become especially so. Multiple studies show that mistreated children are skilled at spotting one emotion in particular: anger. If it is true that, as Proverbs 20:3 asserts, “any fool can start arguments; the honorable thing is to stay out of them,” it often falls on the resilient child to be honorable, or at least not to be foolish. Perhaps this is why they become so attuned to anger. Consider three studies that show what this looks like in a lab.
In the first study, twenty-four children aged eight through ten who had been physically abused were tested alongside twenty-three children of similar age who had not. Children viewed color pictures of faces that displayed anger, happiness, fear, or sadness, one at a time on a computer screen. Each picture was initially presented in an unfocused or “fuzzy” format that made the expression difficult to discern. Every three seconds, the picture of the face became more focused and the emotion became progressively easier to identify. After fourteen of these three-second intervals, the picture was entirely in focus. With each interval, children were asked to judge which emotion, if any, they could discern. The abused children identified angry expressions sooner, on the basis of less information, than did the children who were not abused. These abused children were, however, no quicker to recognize happiness or fear, and they were slower to recognize sadness.
In a related study, these same researchers presented ninety-five nine-year-olds—about half of whom had been physically abused and half of whom had not—with a series of photos of models’ faces as their emotional expressions unfolded from neutral to happy, from neutral to sad, from neutral to angry, from neutral to afraid, or from neutral to surprised. Compared with their non-abused peers, abused children correctly identified anger earlier in the formation of the expression, when fewer facial musculature cues were available. The more hostility was reported in the home, the quicker the child was able to detect an angry expression. In terms of identifying the other emotions—happiness, sadness, fear, surprise—the abused children performed no differently than their peers.
A third study examined whether children who have been exposed to violence not only spot danger sooner, but also remain on alert longer. As measures of arousal, heart rate and skin conductance were measured in eleven abused and twenty-two nonabused four-and five-year-old children while they heard two unfamiliar adults—actors for the study—begin to argue in the next room. The interpersonal episode the children overheard had four phases: (1) neutral conversation, (2) intense angry speech, (3) an unresolved silent period, and (4) a resolution period during which both adults apologized. Both abused and nonabused children became emotionally aroused when the angry speech erupted, but while nonabused children returned to a baseline emotional state upon realizing the conversation did not pertain to them, abused children remained “on alert” in a state of anticipatory monitoring, even throughout the apology phase of the conversation.
Consider these words by Charles Darwin: “Pain or suffering of any kind, if long continued, causes depression and lessens the power of action; yet it is well adapted to make a creature guard itself against any great or sudden evil.” And that is what happens in the brains of many supernormal children: They learn to guard themselves against whatever might come. To live with conflict or uncertainty or violence—especially violence that is unspoken or denied—is to learn that what people do is more important than what people say. As a result, the resilient child may become a shrewd observer of the world around her. She lives in a state of automatic alertness, one that keeps her unconsciously and supremely attuned to subtle changes in the expressions and mannerisms of others. She is like a barometer, always gauging the moods of others in an effort to forecast their behavior. As Jessie said, “My sister was supposed to watch me after school but I was the one who ended up watching her. I watched her like my life depended on it.”
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By the time Jessie was in middle school, she felt like she used her brain more at home than she did at school. Monday through Friday she got off the bus, unlocked the front door, and began scanning for clues about the remainder of the day. With one