Early processing (N170) of infant faces in mothers of children with autism spectrum disorder and its association with maternal sensitivity

Abstract

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit impaired adult facial processing, as shown by the N170 eventrelated potential. However, few studies explore such processing in mothers of children with ASD, and none has assessed the early processing of infant faces in these women. Moreover, whether processing of infant facial expressions in mothers of children with ASD is related to their response to their child's needs (maternal sensitivity [MS]) remains unknown. This study explored the N170 related to infant faces in a group of mothers of children with ASD (MA) and a reference group of mothers of children without ASD. For both emotional (crying, smiling) and neutral expressions, the MA group exhibited larger amplitudes of N170 in the right hemisphere, while the reference group showed similar interhemispheric amplitudes. This lateralization effect within the MA group was not present for nonfaces and was stronger in the mothers with higher MS. We propose that mothers of ASD children use specialized perceptual resources to process infant faces, and this specialization is mediated by MS. Our findings suggest that having an ASD child modulates mothers' early neurophysiological responsiveness to infant cues. Whether this modulation represents a biological marker or a response given by experience remains to be explored. Autism Res 2019, 12: 744-758.Lay Summary: When mothers of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) see baby faces expressing emotions, they show a right-sided electrical response in the brain. This lateralization was stronger in mothers who were more sensitive to their children's needs. We conclude that having a child with ASD and being more attuned to their behavior generates a specialized pattern of brain activity when processing infant faces. Whether this pattern is biological or given by experience remains to be explored.

A scoping review of physiological biomarkers in autism

“…An interesting phenomenon is that the parents of ASD children do not seem to show the effect of left hemisphere lateralization in facial expression processing. While their N170 amplitude is larger in their right hemisphere than in their left hemisphere ( Márquez et al, 2019 ).…”

Maternal psychological risk and the neural correlates of infant face processing: A latent profile analysis

“…For example, studies involving passive viewing frequently report no emotion effects on the N170 in mothers (Lowell et al, 2020(Lowell et al, , 2021Malak et al, 2015;Maupin et al, 2019;Rutherford, Byrne, et al, 2017;Rutherford et al, 2019;Rutherford, Maupin, et al, 2017a;Wall et al, 2022), whereas emotion recognition tasks in which participants categorize infant emotions during each experimental trial have frequently reported associations between infant facial expression and maternal N170 responses (Bernard et al, 2018;Ma et al, 2017;Márquez et al, 2019;Proverbio et al, 2006). Lowell et al (2021) posits that these findings may reflect intentional directing of attention to the infant face stimuli required by emotion recognition tasks, and future work directly comparing different experimental tasks is required to support this proposal.…”

“…However, variability in experimental approaches may contribute to reported differences. For example, studies involving passive viewing frequently report no emotion effects on the N170 in mothers (Lowell et al., 2020, 2021; Malak et al., 2015; Maupin et al., 2019; Rutherford, Byrne, et al., 2017; Rutherford et al., 2019; Rutherford, Maupin, et al., 2017a; Wall et al., 2022), whereas emotion recognition tasks in which participants categorize infant emotions during each experimental trial have frequently reported associations between infant facial expression and maternal N170 responses (Bernard et al., 2018; Ma et al., 2017; Márquez et al., 2019; Proverbio et al., 2006). Lowell et al.…”

Racial disparities in EEG research and their implications for our understanding of the maternal brain

“…Eighteen of 21 studies included parents, beginning as early as pregnancy up to parents with children who were on average 5 years old. These 18 studies compared maternal neural response to infant/child facial expressions (crying, laughing, and/or neutral faces) between groups, such as parents compared with nonparents (Noll et al, 2012 ; Peltola et al, 2014 ; Proverbio et al, 2006 ), CPS-referred mothers receiving a parenting intervention versus control intervention and nonreferred mothers (Bernard et al, 2015 ), mothers with substantiated neglect versus control mothers (Rodrigo et al, 2011 ), mothers who did and did not smoke (Rutherford, Maupin, et al, 2017a ), mothers with and without children with autism spectrum disorder (Márquez et al, 2019 ), and securely attached vs. insecurely attached mothers (Fraedrich et al, 2010 ; Leyh et al, 2016 ). Some studies also examined differences within person, such as pregnancy vs. postpartum (Dudek et al, 2020 ), responses after administration of intranasal oxytocin compared to placebo (Peltola et al, 2018 ), or own infant versus unfamiliar infant faces (Doi & Shinohara, 2012 ).…”