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I'd love to see a study testing the hypothesis that exposure to lots of anger in early childhood leads a person to poor impulse control or greater susceptibilit

I'd love to see a study testing the hypothesis that exposure to lots of anger in early childhood leads a person to poor impulse control or greater susceptibility to addiction. Im not sure how you actually would test this hypothesis without actually measuring something else like the correlation with certain state child welfare laws.

danieltillett 12y ago
I agree that this would be very difficult to test in children, but it should be possible to test in animals.
tedks 12y ago
You would collect a cross-sample of infants from a wide variety of backgrounds and arrange for cameras to be put in their homes. This isn't unethical given certain constraints, and people have agreed to it before. Interactions with the child in the frame are coded by blinded coders as to whether it's an "angry" interaction or not. Every two to five years, you check in with the children and test them on impulse control and addictive behavior. If you have assloads of funding, follow them until they're 50 or 70 or however old you can afford. Of course, nobody has assloads of funding like this, because science has basically reduced itself to clickbait.
- grayclhn 12y ago
  No, even that wouldn't work. "Angry parenting" is going to be massively correlated with many other factors that will affect how parents raise children and with the children's impulse control in general. That's likely to be true even after trying to get a wide variety of backgrounds, etc.
  - tedks 12y ago
    Generally you can control for this statistically; the study yields information of the sort you need, but you're correct that it's not totally causal. But there aren't experiments for most things we'd like to know anyway. Experiments are a nice thing to have, but they're not necessary to gather information and update your beliefs rationally.
    - grayclhn 12y ago
      I would say sometimes you can control for this statistically. When the selection problem is exactly along the dimension you want to measure, (i.e., measure the impulse-control of children of parents with poor impulse-control, but only the part caused by angry yelling) statistical correction is less plausible.
snowwrestler 12y ago
Have you tried Googling various combinations of these phrases? How early childhood stress affects later development has been a hot area of research for at least a decade now. One quick example I found: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/children_shealth/9955892/Arguing-parents-could-damage-their-baby-for-life-study-claims.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/children_shealth/9955892/A...

danieltillett 12y ago

I agree that this would be very difficult to test in children, but it should be possible to test in animals.

tedks 12y ago

You would collect a cross-sample of infants from a wide variety of backgrounds and arrange for cameras to be put in their homes. This isn't unethical given certain constraints, and people have agreed to it before. Interactions with the child in the frame are coded by blinded coders as to whether it's an "angry" interaction or not. Every two to five years, you check in with the children and test them on impulse control and addictive behavior. If you have assloads of funding, follow them until they're 50 or 70 or however old you can afford. Of course, nobody has assloads of funding like this, because science has basically reduced itself to clickbait.

grayclhn 12y ago
No, even that wouldn't work. "Angry parenting" is going to be massively correlated with many other factors that will affect how parents raise children and with the children's impulse control in general. That's likely to be true even after trying to get a wide variety of backgrounds, etc.
- tedks 12y ago
  Generally you can control for this statistically; the study yields information of the sort you need, but you're correct that it's not totally causal. But there aren't experiments for most things we'd like to know anyway. Experiments are a nice thing to have, but they're not necessary to gather information and update your beliefs rationally.
  - grayclhn 12y ago
    I would say sometimes you can control for this statistically. When the selection problem is exactly along the dimension you want to measure, (i.e., measure the impulse-control of children of parents with poor impulse-control, but only the part caused by angry yelling) statistical correction is less plausible.

snowwrestler 12y ago

Have you tried Googling various combinations of these phrases? How early childhood stress affects later development has been a hot area of research for at least a decade now. One quick example I found: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/children_shealth/9955892/Arguing-parents-could-damage-their-baby-for-life-study-claims.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/children_shealth/9955892/A...