Recent Research on Corporal Punishment

Here, I want to provide three examples of recent research on the use of spanking, all involving work by Jorga Cuartes. In each case, I was impressed by the quality of the research studies. The first study, by Cuartes et al. (2021) published in Child Development, examines elevated response to threat by 40 children who were spanked and 107 who were not spanked, with an average age of close to 12 years. They find that, “Children who were spanked exhibited greater activation in multiple regions of the medial and lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), including dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, dorsomedial PFC, bilateral frontal pole, and left middle frontal gyrus in response to fearful relative to neutral faces compared to children who were not spanked. These findings suggest that spanking may alter neural responses to environmental threats in a manner similar to more severe forms of maltreatment.” 

In a second article by Cuartes (2021) published in the same journal, he addresses the effect of spanking on social-emotional skills. He begins by noting that, “Whether spanking is detrimental for social-emotional (SE) development remains controversial, mostly due to disputes around the internal and external validity of existing evidence.” He used a longitudinal sample of Bhutanese children and “Following best-practice recommendations for mitigating issues of selection bias in observational developmental research, the study employed conservative methods (i.e., child fixed-effects and lagged-dependent variables) and robustness checks to assess the internal validity of estimates. Across approaches, spanking predicted reductions in SE skills of .09–.17 SD, even after controlling for all time-invariant confounders and baseline levels of SE skills. These findings strengthen the argument that spanking might be harmful to young children's SE development.”  

The final article in the Harvard Gazette (2021) summarizes the findings of the first article noted above, but expands the research being done by Cuartes and colleagues at Harvard. They note that, “corporal punishment has been linked to the development of mental health issues, anxiety, depression, behavioral problems, and substance use disorders. And recent studies show that approximately half of parents in U.S. studies reported spanking their children in the past year and one-third in the past week.” They explain that they used MRI to examine children’s responses to projected fearful and neutral faces, the findings from spanked children comparable to findings from children who suffered more severe violence. They acknowledge that spanking does not have the same impact on all children, but can be seen as a risk factor.