Abstract
Socio-emotional information processing during everyday human interactions has been assumed to translate to social-emotional information processing when parenting a child. Yet, few studies have examined whether this is indeed the case. This study aimed to improve on this by connecting the functional neuroimaging data when seeing socio-emotional interactions that are not parenting specific to observed maternal sensitivity. The current study considered 45 mothers of small children (12–42 months of age). It included healthy controls (HC) and mothers with interpersonal violence-related posttraumatic stress disorder (IPV-PTSD), as well as mothers without PTSD, both with and without IPV exposure. We found that anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activity correlated negatively with observed maternal sensitivity when mothers watched videos of menacing vs. prosocial adult male–female interactions. This relationship was independent of whether mothers were HC or had IPV-PTSD. We also found dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) activity to be correlated negatively with maternal sensitivity when mothers watched any kind of arousing adult interactions. With regards to ACC and vmPFC activity, we interpret our results to mean that the ease of general emotional information integration translates to parenting-specific behavior. Our dlPFC activity findings support the idea that the efficiency of top-down control of socio-emotional processing in non-parenting specific contexts may be predictive of parenting behavior.
Highlights
Despite multiple clinical observations supporting that a mother’s capacity to perceive and regulate emotion is crucial for sensitive parenting, there is surprisingly a dearth of empirical research confirming those observations (Newman et al, 2007; Arteche et al, 2011; Schechter et al, 2015)
When correcting for IPV-PTSD symptom severity, maternal sensitivity was negatively associated with brain activation in a cluster in the right inferior temporal gyrus and in another cluster that comprised parts of the ventral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)
VmPFC and OFC have been related to the encoding of emotional value as it is affected by conscious emotion regulation strategies both for positive (Winecoff et al, 2013) and negative affect (Diekhof et al, 2011), indicating that it is not just the simple emotional value of the stimulus, that influences the activity of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and OFC, but rather the value of the stimulus in a specific context to a specific person Along these lines, a recent study suggested that backgrounds containing emotional value interact strongly with emotion-specific face processing upon the activation of the subgenual ACC (Van den Stock et al, 2014)
Summary
Despite multiple clinical observations supporting that a mother’s capacity to perceive and regulate emotion is crucial for sensitive parenting, there is surprisingly a dearth of empirical research confirming those observations (Newman et al, 2007; Arteche et al, 2011; Schechter et al, 2015) The latter is true despite the fact that several studies have examined how parents’ cognitive and socio-emotional capacities predict psychological outcome variables such as impulse control, hostile aggression and attachment security and organization in their children (Barrett and Fleming, 2011; Goodman et al, 2011; Lyons-Ruth et al, 2013; Mazursky-Horowitz et al, 2015). While it seems likely that such factors underlie PSEIPB, this deserves further testing
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