Brain Processes in Mothers and Nulliparous Women in Response to Cry in Different Situational Contexts: A Default Mode Network Study

Abstract

In everyday life, parents must respond to and interact with children while in different situational contexts. How situational contexts influence parents' responses has not been systematically studied. Here we investigated mothers' versus nonmothers' neural responses to infant vocalizations in different situations with different task demands. Design: Using fMRI in 21 women (10 mothers), we explored the effects of being distracted by self-oriented (self-referential decisions about personality adjectives) versus goal-oriented (syllabic counting of personality adjectives) tasks while listening to infant cry in comparison with other emotional sounds (infant laughing, adult crying) on the activity of two medial nodes of the Default Mode Network (DMN): the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Results: In the self-oriented task while listening to infant cry, both mothers and nulliparas showed (weak) activation of the DMN; this response likely reflects a shift of attention from the task to the cry. In the goal-oriented task, mothers, not nulliparas, showed (weak) activation of the DMN; this result is compatible with interference of emotional sounds while attending to a goal-oriented task, an activity that deactivates the DMN. Conclusions: Mothers are prone to process infant cry and emotional sounds and are less distracted from doing so by situational contexts, demonstrating their greater sensitivity to emotional sounds such as cry. By contrast, situational context influenced brain responses to infant sounds in nulliparas.

How stress can influence brain adaptations to motherhood

“…However, findings of several recent meta-analyses suggest differences in maternal brain responses to visual vs. auditory infant cues. One of the most noticeable differences is that visual cues more robustly activate reward processing regions such as the hypothalamus, ventral tegmental area, nucleus accumbens, and substantia nigra ( Rigo et al, 2019a , Rocchetti et al, 2014 ). Activation in these maternal motivation regions is particularly strong toward visual cues from one’s own infant compared to a control infant ( Paul et al, 2019 , Rocchetti et al, 2014 ).…”

“…Another reason why infant cry sounds do not elicit consistently strong responses in the brain’s reward areas can be that cry sounds are distressing, whereas visual cues can include both positive and distressing stimuli, such as smiling and crying faces. While visual child cues more robustly activate the reward and motivation regions in the brain, infant cry sounds more robustly activate brain regions involved in processing emotional auditory stimuli such as superior temporal gyrus and somatosensory and motor areas such as supplementary motor area and precentral gyrus ( Rigo et al, 2019a , Witteman et al, 2019 ). In a study that included mothers from three different countries (US, Italy, China), increased responses to infant cry sounds in regions across several brain networks including the supplementary motor area and superior temporal gyrus were found among mothers across cultures ( Bornstein et al, 2017 ).…”

Where Sounds Occur Matters: Context Effects Influence Processing of Salient Vocalisations

“…Several studies have ascertained that emotional recognition of vocalisations demands attentional [40] and prediction resources [37]. Furthermore, human vocalisations which are salient and convey the emotional state of another person are automatically prioritised when pitted against other competing stimuli for selective attention [15,16,36,39,41]. Therefore, integrating salient vocalisations with the ambiguous and unfamiliar OE contextual scenes could have demanded greater recruitment of the rostrolateral PFC so as to make meaning of both the auditory and visual stimuli.…”

“…Similarly, context lends interpretation to salient emotional vocalisations. The functional-contextual theory of emotions posits that vocalisations only serve to attract attention and are subsequently interpreted in a context-dependent manner [12][13][14][15][16]. Recently, ref.…”

Exploring the transition into fatherhood: behavioral, hormonal, and neural underpinnings of responses to infant crying

“…Fleming et al, 2002;Van Anders et al, 2012) and neural processing (e.g. Rigo et al, 2019), are found in a wide variety of mammals regardless of parenting status. However, these processes show some disparities for males and females, as well as for parents and non-parents (e.g.…”