The Role of Paternal Involvement on Behavioral Sensitive Responses and Neurobiological Activations in Fathers: A Systematic Review

Abstract

As fathering research has flourished, a growing body of studies has focused on behavioral and neurobiological mechanisms, respectively associated with caregiving sensitivity and responsiveness to infant stimuli. However, the association between these aspects and the key concept of paternal involvement in childcare (i.e., contribution in infant care in terms of time, availability, and responsibility) has been poorly investigated. The current work aims to systematically review the role of involvement in childcare on both neural activations and sensitive behaviors in fathers by examining (a) how paternal involvement has been measured and (b) whether paternal involvement has been associated with neurobiological activation and behavioral sensitive responses. Inclusion criteria were peer-reviewed quantitative studies, concerning fathers responding to infant stimuli at neurobiological or behavioral level, and including a quantitative measurement of paternal involvement in childcare. A quality rating for each study has been performed based on the measurements adopted to assess paternal involvement. Of 2,529 articles, 27 studies were included. According to our quality rating, 10 out of 27 studies included fairly good-standard measures for measuring paternal involvement, whereas 17 studies used good-standard measures. In addition, 11 studies provided details of paternal involvement in the context of neurobiological responses to infant stimuli, whereas 16 addressed paternal sensitive behaviors. Overall, only 8 studies reported relevant findings about the relationship between paternal involvement and neurobiological responses or sensitive behaviors in fathers. The present study is the first systematically evaluating the scope of paternal involvement in the field of Paternal Brain and fathers' sensitive responsiveness research. When high-standard measures are used, paternal involvement seems to play a significant role in modulating both the hormonal and the neural pathways associated with paternal behaviors. Remarkably, the role of paternal engagement may underpin an adaptive nurturance that is not dependent on pregnancy and childbirth but on caregiving experience. A promising positive link between paternal involvement and behavioral sensitivity may be expected in further studies, which will need to corroborate our conclusion by adopting detailed and appropriate measures assessing paternal involvement. As a future line of research, the inclusion of gay fathers may be beneficial for the field.

Attentional bias to infant faces might be associated with previous care experiences and involvement in childcare in same-sex mothers

“…As the measure from Abraham and colleagues’ work (2014) has been considered an optimum point of reference for assessing caregiving involvement ( Giannotti et al., 2022b ), we decided to extract a pool of the related questions. However, we considered only the items assessing nurturing maternal behaviors on a daily basis, which could be accomplished by both recognized and unrecognized parents in the Italian context.…”

“…However, we considered only the items assessing nurturing maternal behaviors on a daily basis, which could be accomplished by both recognized and unrecognized parents in the Italian context. Those nurturing behaviors are frequently covered in parental involvement measures (for a review, see Giannotti et al., 2022b ). For instance, Laflamme et al.…”

“…With respect to the parental involvement measure, further studies with a larger number of participants should investigate the expected unifactorial structure of the measure selected in our study, in order to ascertain whether it might be reliable or not. Otherwise, a gold-standard and inclusive measure to investigate parental involvement in childcare in the Italian context might be developed in future ( Giannotti et al., 2022b ). Another difficulty in this field is that same-sex parent samples mainly involve individuals with a high or medium-high socio-economic status, as they need to afford the often expensive medical treatments to become parents.…”

Visualizing the Invisible Tie: Linking Parent-Child Neural Synchrony to Parents’ and Children’s Attachment Representations

“…One potential explanation may be the lifetimeassociated impacts of motherhood on cognition and the brain (Orchard et al, 2023). Conversely, father-child interactions may be more strongly affected by how involved fathers are in child rearing (Brown et al, 2012;Giannotti et al, 2022;Lamb, 2010). Higher paternal involvement and associated caregiving beliefs seem to be not only related to intra-individual differences in fathers' brain structure (Abraham & Feldman, 2022;Horstman et al, 2022;Long et al, 2021) but also to interpersonal neural dynamics, including father-child INS (Azhari et al, 2021;Nguyen, Schleihauf, Kungl, et al, 2021).…”

No evidence for relationship between paternal post-partum depressive symptoms and testosterone or cortisol in first-time fathers

“…Across species, male life history strategies are regulated by the neuroendocrine system ( Bribiescas et al, 2012 ). Paternal care is exceedingly rare in mammals ( Geary, 2007 ) and its expression is tied to testosterone (T)—a hormone produced by the hypothalamic pituitary gonadal (HPG) axis ( Book et al, 2001 ; Gettler, 2020 ; see King and Hegadoren, 2002 ; Giannotti et al, 2022 for review). Cortisol—a hormone produced by the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis—also appears to modulate paternal care ( Kuo et al, 2018 ; see Sobral et al, 2022 ).…”