Early maternal care and amygdala habituation to emotional stimuli in adulthood.

Nathalie E Holz,Michael M Plichta,Regina Boecker-Schlier,Daniel Brandeis,Manfred Laucht,Tobias Banaschewski,Christine Jennen-Steinmetz,Alexander Häge,Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg,Sarah Baumeister

doi:10.1093/scan/nsab059

Abstract

Evidence suggests that maternal care constitutes a protective factor for psychopathology which may be conditional on the level of family adversity. Given that psychopathology is frequently linked with social deficits and the amygdala with social functioning, we investigated the impact of early maternal care on amygdala function under high vs low familial risk for psychopathology. Amygdala activity and habituation during an emotional face-matching paradigm was analyzed in participants of an epidemiological cohort study followed since birth (n = 172, 25 years). Early mother–infant interaction was assessed during a standardized nursing and play setting at the age of 3 months. Information on familial risk during the offspring’s childhood and on the participants’ lifetime psychopathology was obtained with diagnostic interviews. An interaction between maternal stimulation and familial risk was found on amygdala habituation but not on activation, with higher maternal stimulation predicting stronger amygdala habituation in the familial risk group only. Furthermore, amygdala habituation correlated inversely with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) diagnoses. The findings underline the long-term importance of early maternal care on the offspring’s socioemotional neurodevelopment and of interventions targeting maternal sensitivity early in life, particularly by increasing maternal interactive behavior in those with familial risk.

Highlights

The level of early maternal care may mitigate the offspring’s risk for psychopathology
Given that psychopathology is frequently linked with social deficits and the amygdala with social functioning, we investigated the impact of early maternal care on amygdala function under high vs low familial risk for psychopathology
The present study investigated whether early maternal care and parental psychopathology interact to predict amygdala habituation

Summary

Introduction

The level of early maternal care may mitigate the offspring’s risk for psychopathology. Early maternal care might have a differential effect depending on the level of family risk, i.e. under high-risk conditions, such as parental psychopathology and low socioeconomic status, high levels of parental care may protect against effects of adversity (Egeland et al, 1993; Pettit et al, 1997; Wakschlag and Hans, 1999; Woodward et al, 2018), while the impact in low-risk families may be less crucial This pattern was demonstrated in young adults who were followed since birth in the context of the Mannheim Study of Children at Risk (Laucht et al, 2000). Effective early primary preventions for these high-risk children are still needed

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