Abstract

Synchrony refers to the coordinated interplay of behavioural and physiological signals that reflect the bi-directional attunement of one partner to the other’s psychophysiological, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral state. In mother-child relationships, a synchronous pattern of interaction indicates parental sensitivity. Parenting stress has been shown to undermine mother-child behavioural synchrony. However, it has yet to be discerned whether parenting stress affects brain-to-brain synchrony during everyday joint activities. Here, we show that greater parenting stress is associated with less brain-to-brain synchrony in the medial left cluster of the prefrontal cortex when mother and child engage in a typical dyadic task of watching animation videos together. This brain region overlaps with the inferior frontal gyrus, the frontal eye field, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which are implicated in inference of mental states and social cognition. Our result demonstrates the adverse effect of parenting stress on mother-child attunement that is evident at a brain-to-brain level. Mother-child brain-to-brain asynchrony may underlie the robust association between parenting stress and poor dyadic co-regulation. We anticipate our study to form the foundation for future investigations into mechanisms by which parenting stress impairs the mother-child relationship.

Highlights

  • Synchrony, the temporal coordination of discrete micro-level signals between dyadic partners[11], is the process by which the physiology and behaviour of mother and child are coordinated into a selective affiliative bond that matures into an enduring attachment[12]

  • Two recent functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging studies showed that parental stress modulated orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) activation when a mother viewed images of her own child[17,18], reinforcing involvement of the prefrontal cortices (PFC) in maternal brain mechanisms related to parenting stress

  • We found a significant association between parenting stress and dyadic mother-child inter-brain synchrony within the medial left PFC cluster

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Summary

Introduction

The temporal coordination of discrete micro-level signals between dyadic partners[11], is the process by which the physiology and behaviour of mother and child are coordinated into a selective affiliative bond that matures into an enduring attachment[12]. The present study sought to investigate how brain-to-brain synchrony, indicated by the alignment of two independent signals across time, varies as a function of parenting stress during a passive joint dyadic attention task. Utilising tandem functional Near-infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), activation patterns in the prefrontal cortices (PFC) of mother and child were recorded simultaneously while dyads watched a series www.nature.com/scientificreports/. As its heightened activity is associated with active “top-down” regulation of emotional responses[17], it is plausible that the PFC is differentially recruited in mothers who report higher as compared to lower parenting stress. We embarked on this study with one principal hypothesis, anticipating that mothers who experience greater parenting stress would exhibit less dyadic prefrontal cortical synchrony when engaging in a task with their child

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