A common neural response to perceiving but not implicitly regulating infant and adult affect in postpartum mothers

Abstract

ABSTRACT The transition to parenthood requires parents develop caregiving behaviors, such as the ability to identify their infant’s emotions and regulate their own emotional response. Research has identified patterns of neural activation in parenting contexts that are interpreted as socioemotional processing. However, no prior research has directly tested whether mothers’ neural responses to their infant’s affect are the same as those involved in emotion perception/experience and regulation in other contexts. We employed conjunction analyses to clarify which components of mothers’ neural response to viewing their infant’s affect are shared with passively viewing and labeling adult affective faces (emotion perception/experience and implicit emotion regulation, respectively) in 24 mothers three months postpartum. Our results support a common neural response to viewing infant and adult affect in regions associated with emotion perception/experience (bilateral hippocampi, amygdalae, thalami, orbitofrontal cortex, and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but no areas of common response to viewing negative infant affect and implicitly regulating negative adult affect outside of the occipital lobe and cerebellum. This study provides corroborating evidence for shared neural patterns being involved in perceiving/experiencing infant and adult affect but not implicit regulation of infant and adult negative affect.