Brain Responses to Emotional Infant Faces in New Mothers and Nulliparous Women

Kaihua Zhang,Mengxing Wang,Diane L Putnick,Paola Rigo,Xiaoxia Du,Marc H Bornstein,Xueyun Su,Gianluca Esposito,Zhong Chen

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-66511-x

Abstract

The experience of motherhood is one of the most salient events in a woman’s life. Motherhood is associated with a series of neurophysiological, psychological, and behavioral changes that allow women to better adapt to their new role as mothers. Infants communicate their needs and physiological states mainly through salient emotional expressions, and maternal responses to infant signals are critical for infant survival and development. In this study, we investigated the whole brain functional response to emotional infant faces in 20 new mothers and 22 nulliparous women during functional magnetic resonance imaging scans. New mothers showed higher brain activation in regions involved in infant facial expression processing and empathic and mentalizing networks than nulliparous women. Furthermore, magnitudes of the activation of the left parahippocampal gyrus and the left fusiform gyrus, recruited during facial expression processing, were positively correlated with empathic concern (EC) scores in new mothers when viewing emotional (happy-sad) faces contrasted to neutral faces. Taken together, these results indicate that the experience of being a mother affects human brain responses in visual and social cognitive brain areas and in brain areas associated with theory-of-mind related and empathic processing.

Highlights

When a woman experiences pregnancy and becomes a new mother, she undergoes a series of physical, psychological, and behavioral changes[1,2,3,4]
Other studies have investigated brain responses to emotional infant stimuli in nulliparous women[34,36], but few Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have focused on the impact of parental status in human brain responses to emotional infant stimuli through direct comparisons of new mothers and nulliparous women, as we do here
When comparing sad faces with neutral faces, the activation of the left parahippocampal gyrus extending to the left fusiform gyrus and left cerebellum anterior/posterior lobes (−30, −30, −21; r = 0.47, P = 0.048, uncorrected) were positively correlated with the empathic concern (EC) score in the new mothers group, and no activations were found in nulliparous women that were related to the EC score

Summary

Introduction

When a woman experiences pregnancy and becomes a new mother, she undergoes a series of physical, psychological, and behavioral changes[1,2,3,4] These changes help new mothers better adapt to their new role and enhance their responsiveness to children[5,6,7,8] Reciprocally, infants communicate their needs and mental states mainly through vocalizations and facial expressions, which convey salient information that elicits affection and nurturing from adults[9,10,11,12]. Attuned mothers infer children’s needs, mental states, or motivations from the behaviors of their children and respond appropriately Such social maternal abilities can be viewed as empathetic competence, which include appropriately perceiving infants’ feelings (called emotional or affective empathy) and recognizing infants’ needs (called cognitive empathy)[19]. Other studies have investigated brain responses to emotional infant stimuli in nulliparous women[34,36], but few fMRI studies have focused on the impact of parental status in human brain responses to emotional infant stimuli through direct comparisons of new mothers and nulliparous women, as we do here

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Discussion

Conclusion