Abstract
Infant faces have distinctive features that together are described as baby schema, a configuration that facilitates caregiving motivation and behavior, and increases the perception of cuteness. In the current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we investigated the effect of a within-subjects intranasal oxytocin administration (24 IU) and caregiving motivation on neural responses to infant faces of varying baby schema in 23 healthy nulliparous women. Overall, infant faces elicited activation in several brain regions involved in reward and salience processing, including the ventral tegmental area (VTA), putamen, amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and insula, and this activation was related to self-reported caregiving motivation. Critically, whereas we hypothesized enhanced neural caregiving-related responses after oxytocin administration, we observed reduced activation in the VTA, putamen and amygdala after oxytocin compared to placebo. In nulliparous women, oxytocin has been shown to reduce neural responses in the same regions in response to social stimuli using other paradigms. Oxytocin might affect neural activation toward social stimuli depending on elicited arousal and personal characteristics. The current study is the first to demonstrate this effect in response to infant faces and thereby adds to specify the role of oxytocin in human social information processing.
Highlights
As proposed by Lorenz in 1943, more pronounced features characteristic of infant faces, such as a large forehead and eyes combined with a small nose, mouth, and chin, would elicit more caregiving behavior and reduce aggression toward the infant (Lorenz, 1943)
The results show that the infant stimuli elicited neural activation in brain areas previously related to reward and salience processing (Seeley et al, 2007; Haber and Knutson, 2010; Rilling, 2013; Feldman, 2015), including the ventral tegmental area (VTA), putamen, insula, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and amygdala
Activation that was observed in the putamen, insula, ACC, and amygdala was positively related to a validated measure of caregiving motivation, the Parental Care and Tenderness (PCAT)-n (Hofer et al, 2017)
Summary
As proposed by Lorenz in 1943, more pronounced features characteristic of infant faces, such as a large forehead and eyes combined with a small nose, mouth, and chin, would elicit more caregiving behavior and reduce aggression toward the infant (Lorenz, 1943). Neuroimaging studies have further shown that baby schema increase activation of several brain regions involved in reward processing, including the ventral tegmental area (VTA), and the ventral striatum (Glocker et al, 2009b; Feldman, 2015; Luo et al, 2015), which might underlie some of these observed behavioral responses. The neural reward circuitry is sensitive to infant faces and to endocrine factors including the neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) that has been ascribed an important role in the facilitation of parent– infant attachment and caregiving behavior (Rilling and Young, 2014; Bos, 2017; Feldman, 2017). Increasing activation of the neural reward circuitry in response to infant faces is one of the mechanisms by which OXT could facilitate parental caregiving. We investigated the effect of OXT on the neural reward circuitry in a group of healthy young nulliparous women when looking at infant faces using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
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