Growing up in a war zone is linked to differences in how a child’s family environment relates to their brain connectivity, a new study suggests. Published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, the research indicates that the link between a child’s attachment-related characteristics and the communication between emotional brain regions differs depending on war-related stress. The findings provide evidence that severe environmental unpredictability is tied to different patterns of neural connectivity, raising the speculative possibility that the developing brain calibrates to its surroundings rather than simply sustaining uniform damage.
Neuroscientists have established that early adversity is linked to altered wiring between emotional hubs and the brain networks responsible for self-control. For example, a study covered by PsyPost in 2025 found that childhood adversity was associated with accelerated decreases in functional connectivity between cortical and subcortical brain regions. These specific neural changes were linked to fewer internalizing symptoms but lower academic performance. Additionally, a 2017 study found that in adult women, a history of childhood stress was linked to altered resting communication between the amygdala and prefrontal regions that regulate emotion.
Building on this foundation, developmental theories predicted that extreme stress recalibrates how attachment and brain systems interact. The authors of a 2011 theoretical paper proposed that harsh, unpredictable environments prompt the developing brain to recalibrate how a child’s stress responses and attachment styles adapt to their surroundings. Applying these ideas to extreme stress, a 2019 study of children growing up near war zones found that chronic adversity is associated with differences in how early caregiving relationships shape empathy-related brain responses.
The new study directly tests this moderation model by examining how a child’s attachment characteristics relate differently to their brain connectivity in the context of war exposure. The research was led by Sarit Roizman and Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus, an associate professor in the Educational Neuroimaging Group at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. They focused on resting-state functional connectivity, which measures how different brain areas communicate with one another when a person is awake but not focused on a specific task.
“We know that chronic, unpredictable stress in childhood is a major risk factor for later anxiety and mood problems, but we know much less about how it gets ‘under the skin’ in the developing brain,” Horowitz-Kraus told PsyPost. “When the war began on October 7, 2023, our lab was in the middle of an ongoing brain-imaging study of Israeli children. This gave us a rare, if painful, opportunity to compare children scanned during the war with children of similar ages scanned before it.”
“The caregiving environment is the child’s first line of defense against stress, so rather than asking whether war simply makes children’s brains ‘different,’ we asked a more specific question: does living through war change how attachment-related characteristics in the family relate to the brain systems that link thinking and emotion?” she added.
To understand these mechanisms, the researchers recruited 79 children between the ages of 5 and 13. The participants were divided into two groups based on when they were assessed. The war-exposed group included 42 children who lived in Israel and were evaluated between October 2023 and December 2024, during an active period of war. The non-exposed comparison group consisted of 37 children who were assessed prior to the war, between 2021 and August 2023.
All children underwent a resting-state brain scan using magnetic resonance imaging. To help the children stay still in the scanner, they watched abstract visual patterns without sound. Parents completed detailed questionnaires to assess different aspects of the child’s life and behavior. This included a measure of executive functions to track everyday difficulties with memory, organization, and self-control.
Parents also completed a questionnaire assessing attachment-related anxiety, such as worrying about abandonment, and attachment-related avoidance, such as preferring not to share deep feelings. For the war-exposed group, parents filled out a specialized survey tallying the family’s exposure to war-related events. This survey asked how often the family heard air raid sirens, experienced disruptions to their daily routines, or dealt with the absence of a caregiver due to military reserve duty.
The researchers found that the two groups did not differ in their overall levels of attachment-related anxiety or avoidance. Initially, the war-exposed children seemed to have more difficulties with executive functions, but this difference was not statistically significant once the researchers adjusted for nonverbal intelligence and the timing of the assessments. The actual group differences emerged in how the children’s brains were wired in relation to their attachment characteristics.
“War did not produce a single, uniform effect on children,” Horowitz-Kraus noted. “What differed was how attachment related to how the child’s brain is wired, which may have long-term effects.”
In both groups, children showed a range of attachment-related difficulties, but the neural patterns associated with those difficulties differed entirely depending on whether the child was exposed to war. In the war-exposed group, higher levels of attachment anxiety and avoidance were associated with moderately reduced communication between the cingulate cortex and the amygdala, two key structures that process emotional reactions. In the non-exposed group, the exact same attachment difficulties were associated with a different pattern: moderately reduced connectivity between the amygdala and the hippocampus, a brain region central to memory formation.
“What really struck me, which I shouldn’t be surprised about after twenty years of researching this phenomenon, is how behavior is translated into brain function- the anxiety was seen in children’s altered brain function,” Horowitz-Kraus explained. “Within each group, the associations between attachment and emotion-related connectivity were moderate to fairly strong,” she added.
Additionally, the researchers examined communication between large-scale brain networks, such as the default mode network, which is active during internal thought, and the salience network, which detects important emotional or sensory cues. They found indications that the relationship between attachment difficulties and large-scale network communication actually reversed depending on how much war-related exposure a child’s family reported. At lower levels of exposure, attachment difficulties were linked to negative or reduced communication between these networks. At higher levels of exposure, the association flipped, becoming positive. While the overall interaction between exposure and attachment was statistically robust, the specific shifting patterns at each level of exposure did not pass strict statistical thresholds, meaning they should be interpreted with caution.
“This is evidence that should guide further research,” Horowitz-Kraus said. “It cannot be used to diagnose or predict outcomes for any individual child but definitely triggers additional questions related to how different levels of exposure are related to parent-child relations and what the long-term effect would be- we are focusing on these questions these days.”
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, which found that an individual’s attachment style predicts how their brain’s emotion and cognitive control networks respond to relational experiences and perceived threats. The new results build on this concept, highlighting that extreme environmental stressors like war are tied to complex shifts in how family attachment characteristics and a child’s brain networks relate to one another.
“In other words, similar relational profiles may rest on different brain mechanisms depending on the environment a child is growing up in,” Horowitz-Kraus pointed out. “That matters for how we assess and support children in times of crisis, and it points to caregiver–child relationships and emotional co-regulation as a promising target for support.”
The comparison group, assessed before the official onset of the war, cannot be considered entirely free from stress, as children living in the region may have experienced varying levels of environmental adversity prior to October 2023. Because the two groups were assessed at different time periods, it is difficult to completely separate the effects of war exposure from broader changes that occurred over time.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. “Please don’t read this as ‘war damages children’s brains,’” Horowitz-Kraus emphasized. “One speculative possibility is that these patterns reflect the developing brain calibrating to an unpredictable environment rather than a deficit, but our data cannot tell adaptation apart from vulnerability.”
The study design captures a single snapshot in time, meaning it provides evidence for associations but cannot confirm that war exposure directly causes these brain changes. The researchers also relied on parent-reported questionnaires rather than directly observing parent-child interactions or conducting clinical psychological evaluations. The study did not measure symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, or depression in the children or their parents.
It is possible that the mental health of the parents, who were also experiencing the stress of war, influenced both the children’s brain development and the parents’ responses on the questionnaires. “We are also interested to know if some aspect of children’s characteristics can serve as ‘protecting’ factors- helping some children to be less affected by these adverse events,” the researcher noted.
“The most important next step is longitudinal research that follows these children and others over time, to see whether these brain–behavior patterns predict later emotional and cognitive outcomes and how they change as circumstances stabilize,” Horowitz-Kraus said. “Ultimately, we hope this work will inform interventions that strengthen caregiver–child co-regulation to help buffer children against the effects of prolonged stress.”
“This study complements our related work showing that war-related stress is associated with differences in cognitive-control and sensory network connectivity in children,” she added. “I’m deeply grateful to the families who took part in research during such a difficult period, and to the Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation for funding this work.”
The study, “War-related exposure moderates the association between attachment-related characteristics and cognitive–limbic functional connectivity in children: an fMRI study,” was authored by Sarit Roizman, Rola Farah, Ayelet Elor, Dror Kraus, Mika Rotman, Noga Gal, and Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus.