Quality of Early Parental Care Reported by Mothers is Related to Anterior Cingulate Response to Own Infant Stimuli: Preliminary Findings

The human parental brain: in vivo neuroimaging

Interacting parenting thoughts and behaviors, supported by key brain circuits, critically shape human infants' current and future behavior. Indeed, the parent-infant relationship provides infants with their first social environment, forming templates for what they can expect from others, how to interact with them and ultimately how they go on to themselves to be parents. This review concentrates on magnetic resonance imaging experiments of the human parent brain, which link brain physiology with parental thoughts and behaviors. After reviewing brain imaging techniques, certain social cognitive and affective concepts are reviewed, including empathy and trust-likely critical to parenting. Following that is a thorough study-by-study review of the state-of-the-art with respect to human neuroimaging studies of the parental brain-from parent brain responses to salient infant stimuli, including emotionally charged baby cries and brief visual stimuli to the latest structural brain studies. Taken together, this research suggests that networks of highly conserved hypothalamic-midbrain-limbic-paralimbic-cortical circuits act in concert to support parental brain responses to infants, including circuits for limbic emotion response and regulation. Thus, a model is presented in which infant stimuli activate sensory analysis brain regions, affect corticolimbic limbic circuits that regulate emotional response, motivation and reward related to their infant, ultimately organizing parenting impulses, thoughts and emotions into coordinated behaviors as a map for future studies. Finally, future directions towards integrated understanding of the brain basis of human parenting are outlined with profound implications for understanding and contributing to long term parent and infant mental health.

Annual Research Review: All mothers are not created equal: neural and psychobiological perspectives on mothering and the importance of individual differences

Quality of mothering relies on the integrity of multiple physiological and behavioral systems and on two maternal factors, one proximal and one distal, that have a great impact on how a mother mothers: postpartum depression and early experiences. To mother appropriately requires the action of systems that regulate sensation, perception, affect, reward, executive function, motor output and learning. When a mother is at risk to engage in less than optimal mothering, such as when she is depressed or has experienced adversity in childhood, the function of many or all of maternal and related systems may be affected. In this paper, we will review what is currently known about the biological basis of mothering, with attention to literature on hormones but with a particular focus on recent advances in the fields of functional neuroimaging. Instead of discussing strictly 'maternal' brain imaging studies, we instead use a systems approach to survey important findings relevant to brain systems integral to and/or strongly related to the mothering experience: (a) social behavior; (b) reward and affect; (c) executive function; and (d) maternal behavior. We find that there are many commonalities in terms of the brain regions identified across these systems and, as we would expect, all are sensitive to the influence of, or function differently in the context of, depression and adverse early experience. It is likely that the similarity and cross-talk between maternal, affect and stress systems, observed behaviorally, hormonally and in the context of brain function, allows for mood disturbance and early adverse experiences to have a significant impact on the quality of mothering and the motivation to mother.