Ned Kalin's Deep Understanding

The University of Wisconsin, Madison’s PR machine recently issued a news release that was then dutifully reprinted by media outlets across the country. You can read a local iteration here.

A few excerpts:

Stressed family affects baby girls later in life, UW study says

November 12, 2012. BILL NOVAK | The Capital Times

Stress shown in the family can have an adverse effect on infant girls as they grow older, according to new results from a long-running population study by UW-Madison scientists.

... Young men studied did not show the same pattern.

The study showed baby girls who lived in homes with stressed mothers were more likely to grow into preschoolers with higher levels of cortisol, a stress hormone.

The study also showed girls with higher levels of cortisol showed less communication between brain areas associated with emotion regulation 14 years later.

Those two combined factors predicted higher levels of adolescent anxiety at age 18.

... "Our findings raise questions on how boys and girls differ in the life impact of early stress," Davidson said. "We do know that women report higher levels of mood and anxiety disorders, and these sex-based differences are very pronounced, especially in adolescence."

Others involved in the study include Drs. Rasmus Birn, Paula Ruttle, Johathan Oler and Ned Kalin, and Diane Stodola, Andrea Hayes, Michelle Fox, Erin Molloy and Jeffrey Armstrong.

The key finding, according to the university, is that girls in stress-filled homes suffer greater and more long lasting negative effects than boys. More specifically, it was girls with stressed mothers.

Undoubtedly, all the people named as having been involved in the study knew the results many months ago. The publication pipeline is a little sluggish.

So, what did they do with the new knowledge that girls raised in stress-filled homes or with stressed mothers can suffer significant and perhaps permanent deleterious effect?

Ned Kalin designed and launched a project, controversial for its cruelty and lack of applicability to humans, to examine brain development in chronically stressed motherless infant male monkeys.

Kalin's response to the discovery that girls suffer the greatest harm from stressful environments was to resurrect cruel maternal deprivation methods developed by Harry Harlow and make the lives of motherless infant male rhesus monkeys a living hell.

Logic like this goes a long way to explaining how he became the Chair of the UW-Madison Psychiatry Department.

People who don’t understand science might have guessed that the results of the study would have been communicated to social workers in order to help them understand the need to be particularly vigilant and supportive of families with girls in them. But that would just show how little you understand science.

It takes a clear thinking senior scientist supported at all levels by an adoring university to see more deeply into the meaning of the results and understand that harm to human girls is best prevented by experimenting on motherless male monkeys.

For much more on the Kalin study see: UW-Not In Our Name.