The study, led by first author Peter Ducharme, MSW, a clinical social worker at Boston Children's, compared two groups of 9- to 17-year-old children admitted to the hospital's Psychiatry Inpatient Service who had high levels of anger.
"The connections between the brain's executive control centers and emotional centers are weak in people with severe anger problems, " explains Gonzalez-Heydrich, chief of Psychopharmacology at Boston Children's and senior investigator on the study.