Amid an opioid crisis, troubling images and videos of parents using drugs in front of their children have been surfacing. Now, new research gives us a deeper look into the brains of people addicted to opioids, finding that the drugs seem to affect their natural parenting instincts.
The study coming out of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Medical School suggests opioids may affect how someone perceives the cuteness of a baby.
Drug addicts’ brains don’t respond to an infant’s face, big round eyes and bulging cheeks — physical features that normally trigger a person’s caregiver abilities, a study found.
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According to the study, when people with an opioid addiction looked at images of cute babies, the area in their brain called the ventral striatum — linked to reward — didn’t show any activity.
But when the same individuals were shown the images again, except this time on medication that blocked the effects of opioids, the individuals’ reward centres lit up.
Scientists figured this out by scanning the brains of 47 women and men dependent on opioids before and after they received treatment. The scans were also compared with the brain responses of 25 non-drug users.
The photos of babies used during the experiments were manipulated to adjust the “baby schema.” In other words, the babies were Photoshopped to make them look even cuter than they already were.
Baby schema is a concept used to describe an infant’s set of physical features that are considered so cute that it makes you want to take care of it.
“When the participants were given an opioid blocker, their baby schema became more similar to that of healthy people,” Dr. Daniel D. Langleben, one of the researchers told the New York Times.
The findings suggest that initially, the brains of people with opioid dependence on drugs such as oxycodone, fentanyl or heroin, didn’t respond to the baby schema.
But once they got treatment and were given a drug called naltrexone that blocks the effects of opioids, the individual’s brains responded in a way more similar to non-drug users, the study found.
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It’s no coincidence that we almost instinctively love babies and find their big eyes and cheeks irresistible, a study in 2009 found. According to that study, the mere act of looking at a infant’s face, makes the brain react in a way that triggers parental instincts.
Recently, shocking photos of parents abusing drugs with their children around have been surfacing. In September, Ohio police posted a graphic photo of overdosed parents in a SUV with their four-year-old child in the backseat, to show the impact of the heroin and painkiller epidemic.
The world was also shocked when a heartbreaking video posted to Facebook showed a dad telling his eight-year-old son his mother died from a drug overdose in Ohio. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2,744 deaths in Ohio in 2014 were due to drug overdoses.
And although there are no clear Canada-wide numbers, in British Columbia for example, there are 488 people who have died so far this year from a drug overdose, newly released numbers show.
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