Abstract
The ability to provide appropriate responses to infant distress is vital to paternal care, but may be affected by fathers’ experiences of childhood maltreatment. Detrimental effects of childhood maltreatment have been found in the adult brain's white matter fibers, accompanied with impaired emotional and cognitive functioning. In the current study (N = 121), we examined new and expectant fathers’ childhood maltreatment experiences (i.e. emotional and physical abuse and neglect), current behavioral responses (i.e. handgrip force) to infant cry sounds, and white matter integrity using diffusion tensor imaging. First, more exposure to childhood maltreatment was associated with more use of excessive handgrip force in response to infant crying by fathers. Second, the association between experienced childhood maltreatment and white matter integrity was not significant in whole‐brain analyses. Lastly, we found that the association between maltreatment exposure and excessive handgrip force during infant crying was absent in fathers with high tract integrity in the bilateral uncinate fasciculus. These findings possibly point to insufficient behavioral inhibition or emotional dysregulation in fathers who experienced childhood maltreatment, but buffering for this effect in those with larger integrity in brain fibers connecting the amygdala and prefrontal cortex.
Highlights
Paternal care greatly impacts the development of children; higher quality of care has been found to positively affect children's social, cognitive, and linguistic development
Based on the available literature, we suggest that the association between experienced maltreatment and fathers’ ability to modulate handgrip force in reaction to infant crying might be mediated by the brain's white matter structure in regions commonly associated with childhood maltreatment
121 first-time fathers with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data available were included into the analyses reported here, see Figure S1 for a flow chart
Summary
Paternal care greatly impacts the development of children; higher quality of care has been found to positively affect children's social, cognitive, and linguistic development (see Lamb, 2010, for reviews). Males and females with experiences of childhood maltreatment (i.e. parental neglect) were found to have more difficulty modulating handgrip force when exposed to infant crying even though they did not rate the sound more negatively (Buisman et al, 2018) Combined, these studies call for a closer look at how fathers’ experiences of childhood maltreatment relate to maladaptive responses to infant signals. Based on the available literature, we suggest that the association between experienced maltreatment and fathers’ ability to modulate handgrip force in reaction to infant crying might be mediated by the brain's white matter structure in regions commonly associated with childhood maltreatment. | 5 model that white matter integrity in these structures moderates the relation between experienced childhood maltreatment and handgrip force in response to infant crying
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