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Even the most severely abused children usually remain attached to their parents. To investigate the neurophysiology of abusive attachment, researchers performed conditioning experiments on infant rats during the first 10 days of life, when the rat is blind and deaf and becomes attached to its mother through her scent.
Rat pups did not attempt to nurse when the mother's odor was removed by washing. After a neutral odor had been paired with either stroking or a shock, pups approached the learned odor in a maze or when it was on the mother. However, pups had no response to an unconditioned odor. When the stress hormone corticosterone was injected before conditioning, only pups with shock–odor conditioning avoided the odor; they also spent less …