Parents conflict can affect children’s mental health and can do lasting damages to kids, a new study said. According to researchers the emotional processing of these children, too, can be affected – potentially making them over-vigilant, anxious and vulnerable to distorting human interactions that are neutral in tone, throwing them off-balance interpersonally as adults, Health News reported.
Even low-level adversity like parental conflict is not good for kids,” said Alice Schermerhorn, an assistant professor in the University of Vermont’s Department of Psychological Sciences and the lead author of the study.
Schermerhorn saw two possible interpretations of the results. The inaccuracy may attributable to hypervigilance.
“If their perception of conflict and threat leads children to be vigilant for signs of trouble, that could lead them to interpret neutral expressions as angry ones or may simply present greater processing challenges,” she said.
“They may be more tuned into angry interactions, which could be a cue for them to retreat to their room, or happy ones, which could signal that their parents are available to them,” she said. “Neutral interactions don’t offer much information, so they may not value them or learn to recognize them.”
The study is also one of the first to measure the impact of temperamental shyness on the children’s ability to process and recognize emotion.
