Neural Responses to Infant Emotions and Emotional Self-Awareness in Mothers and Fathers during Pregnancy.

Cristina Trentini,Marco Lauriola,Marco Pagani,Renata Tambelli

doi:10.3390/ijerph17093314

Abstract

Neuroscientific research has largely investigated the neurobiological correlates of maternal and (to a much lesser extent) paternal responsiveness in the post-partum period. In contrast, much less is known about the neural processing of infant emotions during pregnancy. Twenty mothers and 19 fathers were recruited independently during the third trimester of pregnancy. High-density electroencephalography (hdEEG) was recorded while expectant parents passively viewed images representing distressed, ambiguous, happy, and neutral faces of unknown infants. Correlational analyses were performed to detect a link between neural responses to infant facial expressions and emotional self-awareness. In response to infant emotions, mothers and fathers showed similar cerebral activity in regions involved in high-order socio-affective processes. Mothers and fathers also showed different brain activity in premotor regions implicated in high-order motor control, in occipital regions involved in visuo-spatial information processing and visual mental imagery, as well as in inferior parietal regions involved in attention allocation. Low emotional self-awareness negatively correlated with activity in parietal regions subserving empathy in mothers, while it positively correlated with activity in temporal and occipital areas implicated in mentalizing and visual mental imagery in fathers. This study may enlarge knowledge on the neural response to infant emotions during pregnancy.

Highlights

IntroductionNeuroscientific research has largely investigated the neurobiological correlates of maternal and (to a much lesser extent) paternal responsiveness in the post-partum period
Neuroscientific research has largely investigated the neurobiological correlates of maternal and paternal responsiveness in the post-partum period
Whilst mothers were more inclined to engage in interpreting than in empathizing with ambiguous emotions, fathers were prone to analyze the perceptual features of infants’ faces, engage in a self-referential activity, and, compared to mothers, activate a broader emotional regulatory response while resonating with infant emotions. We suggest that these results may be interpreted as the expression of the potential significance that these emotions may have for parents

Summary

Introduction

Neuroscientific research has largely investigated the neurobiological correlates of maternal and (to a much lesser extent) paternal responsiveness in the post-partum period. Investigations employing audio-visual microanalysis of mother–infant interactions have provided evidence that mothers rapidly modify their behavior in response to the emotional cues of their children [4] to develop mutual coordination based on emotional sharing [2,5] These parental behavioral adjustments to infant emotions have been defined as intuitive (that is, faster than controlled conscious responses), since they occur within a temporal interval of. Sensitive and attuned parental behaviors are activated by the peculiar features of the infant’s physiognomy (which is characterized by big eyes, a high and protruding forehead, chubby cheeks, small nose, mouth, and chin), and plump body shape [11,12] Such features constitute a “baby schema”—or, as postulated by Lorenz [13,14]—, a Kindchenschema, which represents a biologically relevant stimulus to which adults, especially parents, are highly motivated to respond [13,14,15,16,17,18]. Recent neuroimaging investigations have found that, for mothers, infant faces preferentially engage attention compared to adult faces [22]

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