Duration of exclusive breastfeeding is associated with differences in infants’ brain responses to emotional body expressions

Abstract

Much research has recognized the general importance of maternal behavior in the early development and programing of the mammalian offspring’s brain. Exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) duration, the amount of time in which breastfed meals are the only source of sustenance, plays a prominent role in promoting healthy brain and cognitive development in human children. However, surprisingly little is known about the influence of breastfeeding on social and emotional development in infancy. In the current study, we examined whether and how the duration of EBF impacts the neural processing of emotional signals by measuring electro-cortical responses to body expressions in 8-month-old infants. Our analyses revealed that infants with high EBF experience show a significantly greater neural sensitivity to happy body expressions than those with low EBF experience. Moreover, regression analyses revealed that the neural bias toward happiness or fearfulness differs as a function of the duration of EBF. Specifically, longer breastfeeding duration is associated with a happy bias, whereas shorter breastfeeding duration is associated with a fear bias. These findings suggest that breastfeeding experience can shape the way in which infants respond to emotional signals.

Genetic variation in CD38 and breastfeeding experience interact to impact infants’ attention to social eye cues

“…More specifically, our results show that infants who were exclusively breastfed for a longer duration exhibit increased looking to happy eyes than those infants exclusively breastfed for a shorter duration. This finding confirms our prediction based on previous work in which longer exclusive breastfeeding durations were associated with greater attention allocation in infants to happy body expressions as indexed by ERP measures (61). This increased sensitivity to happiness in others as a function of exclusive breastfeeding duration is also seen in mothers (60), suggesting that infants' and mothers' responses to happiness are similarly affected by breastfeeding experience.…”

“…The duration in which human infants are fed with breast milk exclusively (exclusive breastfeeding; EBF) is recognized to facilitate cognitive (52)(53)(54)(55)(56) and neural development (57)(58)(59). However, only recently, EBF has been linked to differences in emotion processing in both mothers (60) and infants (61). In both studies, an extended duration of EBF was associated with increased sensitivity to happiness in others.…”

“…A questionnaire developed in house was completed by mothers to obtain detailed information on breastfeeding experience (60,61). Mothers filled out a table that detailed a feeding plan for a typical day.…”

Genetic Variation in the Maternal Oxytocin System Affects Cortisol Responsiveness to Breastfeeding in Infants and Mothers

“…Previous research has related breastfeeding with positive health, cognitive, and social outcomes in infants (Deoni et al 2013;Isaacs et al 2010;Krol et al 2015b). The current study provides evidence for one possible mechanism accounting for some of these effects, which is the regulation of HPA activity in infants through endogenous maternal oxytocin.…”

“…the duration of exclusive breastfeeding, percentage of breastfed meals per day), as well as general demographic questions regarding duration of maternity leave, parity, maternal education, and ethnicity. Details of this in-house questionnaire have been published elsewhere (Krol et al 2014; In analyses CA and AA infants were grouped together et al 2015a; Krol et al 2015b). A short form of the Social Support Questionnaire (SSQ6) was administered in order to gauge the amount of social support the mothers felt they had, as well as how satisfied they were with the support (Sarason et al 1987).…”