Increased child‐evoked activation in the precuneus during facial affect recognition in mothers

Plank, Irene Sophia; Attar, Catherine Hindi; Kunas, Stefanie L.; Bermpohl, Felix; Dziobek, Isabel

doi:10.1002/hbm.25825

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 75 publications

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“…This study is the first to compare mothers and non-mothers in a task measuring motivational responses to infant stimuli. Comparing these two groups in a motivationrelated behavioral task provides insight into how previously observed differences in brain activation towards infant stimuli between mothers and non-mothers (e.g., Peltola et al, 2014;Plank et al, 2022;Vuoriainen et al, 2022;Zhang et al, 2020) might also be reflected in behavior. In the future, modifying the paradigms measuring motivational responses to address the factors underlying viewing times in more detail (i.e., whether decreases in looking at crying infant faces are due to willingness to act, aversion to infant crying, or other factors) will be important.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of parity and salivary hormonal levels on motivation towards infant emotions

Sinisalo,

Hahn,

Jones

et al. 2024

Preprint

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We studied 54 Finnish first-time mothers and 42 non-mothers in a pay-per-view key-press task where the participants were shown 20 infant faces with smiling and crying expressions. Participants were able to adjust the time each face was visible. In addition, salivary testosterone, estradiol, and cortisol levels were measured and their impact on motivation towards infants analyzed. When controlling for the hormonal levels, happy infant faces were viewed longer than crying faces and there was no difference in mean viewing times between mothers and non-mothers. An interaction between parity and emotion emerged: mothers were more motivated to view happy faces and less motivated to view crying infant faces than non-mothers. Testosterone had a significant effect on viewing times: the higher the testosterone levels were, the shorter amount of time infant faces were viewed. This indicates that testosterone is inversely associated with approach motivation to emotional infant stimuli. This study is the first to compare mothers and non-mothers in a task measuring motivational responses to infant stimuli and indicates that the difference between the approach motivation caused by happy and distressed infant emotions might be more heightened in new mothers.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of parity and salivary hormonal levels on motivation towards infant emotions

Sinisalo,

Hahn,

Jones

et al. 2024

Preprint

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“…Thus, recognizing the emotion of the infant face can facilitate active human interactions. Studies indicated that the recognition of facial expression included several processes, such as processing the visual information and extract relevant features connected to the portrayed information, then infer the affective state based on these features [ 13 ]. Additionally, Kanske et al reported that facial affect recognition combines the affection and cognition of social understanding, which enable such representations via creating vicarious affective states in the observer (empathy) [ 14 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender differences in brain response to infant emotional faces

Zhang

Liu³

et al. 2022

BMC Neurosci

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Infant emotional stimuli can preferentially engage adults’ attention and provide valuable information essential for successful interaction between adults and infants. Exploring the neural processes of recognizing infant stimuli promotes better understandings of the mother-infant attachment mechanisms. Here, combining task-functional magnetic resonance imaging (Task-fMRI) and resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI), we investigated the effects of infants’ faces on the brain activity of adults. Two groups including 26 women and 25 men were recruited to participate in the current study. During the task-fMRI, subjects were exposed to images of infant emotional faces (including happy, neutral, and sad) randomly. We found that the brains of women and men reacted differently to infants’ faces, and these differential areas are in facial processing, attention, and empathetic networks. The rs-fMRI further showed that the connectivity of the default-mode network-related regions increased in women than in men. Additionally, brain activations in regions related to emotional networks were associated with the empathetic abilities of women. These differences in women might facilitate them to more effective and quick adjustments in behaviors and emotions during the nurturing infant period. The findings provide special implications and insights for understanding the neural processing of reacting to infant cues in adults.

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Mothers need more information to recognise associated emotions in child facial expressions

Plank

Christiansen

Kunas

et al. 2022

Cognition and Emotion

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Infant and child faces receive more attention than adult faces, especially when they are portraying emotions. This preferential treatment is increased in mothers. It is unclear how this affects the ability to recognise child emotions and at which age children lose this preferential treatment. Using morphed videos where a neutral face continually and gradually takes on an emotion, we were able to quantify the amount of information needed to identify the emotion. We investigated amount of information needed as well as accuracy both separately and as an integrated performance score. We expected mothers to perform better than non-mothers and both groups to perform better when encountering adolescents as compared to children. We also hypothesised an interaction with the difference between mothers and non-mothers being larger for pre-schoolers than for adolescents.Both groups indeed performed better when recognising the emotions of adolescents than of preschoolers possibly due to their increasingly adult features. Contrary to our hypotheses, mothers performed worse than non-mothers in every age group due to their need for more information to identify the emotions with the same level as accuracy as non-mothers. Both groups performed similarly on a control task where they had to identify animals instead of emotions. This indicates that mothers need more information for affect recognition specifically and not for similar tasks not involving emotions. A possible explanation is that emotional child faces have a greater emotional impact on mothers than non-mothers leading to task interference. Further research is needed to examine possible causes of this effect including differences in affective social understanding as well as whether the effect extends to adult faces.

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Increased child‐evoked activation in the precuneus during facial affect recognition in mothers

Cited by 4 publications

References 75 publications

Impact of parity and salivary hormonal levels on motivation towards infant emotions

Impact of parity and salivary hormonal levels on motivation towards infant emotions

Gender differences in brain response to infant emotional faces

Mothers need more information to recognise associated emotions in child facial expressions

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