Question: what makes some children hurtful and cold people?

Luna Munoz answered on 16 Mar 2011:

We’re learning a lot about the factors that might contribute to some children becoming cold and uncaring people. One of the recent things that I have found is that the most cold and uncaring children were the ones who seemed to be “blind” to seeing fear in other people’s faces or body language. I showed children who came from a poor/violent neighborhood in Manchester some faces of people showing a lot of different emotions. Then, I showed them some body language of people showing emotion (for example, jumping up in the air for happiness). The ones who could not identify a fear face or a fear body language were the ones who were most cold and uncaring.

It could be that fear is something you learn to see in other people because you have felt it for yourself. I have been doing work in this area and youths who are cold and uncaring show very little sweating from their skin when they have had something rude and threatening said to them during a ‘game’ they played in the lab with a same-age opponent. So, these children seem to not feel emotions very much and may then have problems ‘seeing’ emotions in others. In some ways, seeing emotions in other people could stop you from hurting them; that’s according to one theory. I will need to do more research to see if this theory is true.

I will also be doing some work (or my PhD student will 🙂 ) on how parents talk to their children about emotions. Parents may fail to talk about emotions and some children might really need to understand other people’s emotions and thoughts at an early age. So, it could be that some children have genes that play a role in their cold manner and possibly parents can overcome the effects of these genes; this possibility is for me and my student to test out.