Abstract
Women usually cradle their infants to the left of their body midline. Research showed that the left cradling could be altered by affective symptoms in mothers, so that right cradling might be associated with a reduced ability to become emotionally involved with the infant. In this study, we assessed cradling-side bias (using family photo inspection and an imagination task), as well as depression and empathy, in 50 healthy mothers of 0–3 years old children. The main finding was that the strength of the left-cradling bias was negatively related with participants’ depression scores and slightly positively related with their empathy scores. Our results thus provide further evidence that cradling-side preferences can represent an evolutionary proxy of mother’s affective state, influencing the early development of the infant social brain and behaviour.
Highlights
Maternal cradling is the female gender-specific motor behaviour wherein the mother holds an infant close to her body by using arms and hands[1]
The exact evolutionary pressures which shaped these behavioural asymmetries are still unclear, but animal studies seem to suggest a common pattern of lateralisation in vertebrates according to which the left hemisphere would be specialised for processing approach and manipulation responses, whereas the right hemisphere would be better specialised for avoidance responses, for detecting and reacting to threatening stimuli, and for monitoring conspecifics
When participants were split according to their cradling preference as assessed by the cradling laterality quotient (CLQ) and the imagined cradling side, significant differences were observed in depression scores (F(3,45) = 7.79; p = 0.0003)
Summary
A significantly larger proportion of participants imagined a cradling action corresponding (rather than non-corresponding) to their cradling-side preference as defined by the classification based on the CLQ from photos (36 [73.5%] vs 13 [26.5%]; χ2(1) = 10.796; p = 0.001). As regards empathy scores (BEES), no significant difference was observed between participants who imagined a right-cradling (M = 34.05) or a left-cradling woman (M = 41.96; t(48) = −1.333; p = 0.189). No significant difference was observed between the empathy scores of participants whose cradling-side preferences (CLQ score classification) corresponded with those of the imagined woman (M = 38.94) and the empathy scores of participants whose cradling-side preferences did not correspond with those of the imagined woman (M = 37.61; t(47) = 0.202; p = 0.84). When participants were split according to their cradling preference as assessed by the CLQ and the imagined cradling side, significant differences were observed in depression scores (F(3,45) = 7.79; p = 0.0003).
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