3-019 - Comparing Fathers’ and Mothers’ Sensitivity to Infants: Insights from Neuroimaging

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Both fathers and mothers play an important role in parenting and infants’ socioemotional and cognitive development. New mothers and fathers undergo biological changes that support developing parent-infant relationships. However, little has been known about neural mechanisms of mothers vs. fathers. Thus, the current symposium will discuss how fatherhood and motherhood can lead to changes in the brain, which further influence parental sensitivity to infants.

The first paper presents evidence on neural and hormonal correlates of paternal sensitivity. In men, parenthood was associated with heightened neural responses to infants in brain reward circuits. This finding is similar to findings in the maternal brain literature. Interestingly, the higher activation of the brain reward system in fathers was associated with smaller testes volume and lower testosterone, indicating a unique trade-off between mating and parenting effects among fathers. The second paper suggests the influence of fatherhood on how mothers perceive their own infants. High levels of fathers’ involvement in parenting were positively associated with brain responses to infants among new mothers. The third paper compares neural correlates of maternal and paternal sensitivity. In both mothers and fathers, new parents showed increased activation in the brain reward circuits as well as emotion regulation circuits in response to their own infants’ cry sounds. However, where the brain reward circuits were more directly associated with parenting and infants’ outcomes in mothers, the emotion regulation circuits were more directly associated with those outcomes in fathers. These three papers highlight interactions of biological systems supporting father- and mother-infant attachments.

Sub Unit

• Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Chair

• Pilyoung Kim, University of Denver

Individual Presentations

• Biological correlates of individual variation in human paternal behavior - Presenting Author: James K Rilling, Emory University; Jennifer Mascaro, Department of Anthropology, Emory University

• Fathers Matter: Paternal Involvement Linked to Maternal Brain Response to Infant Cry - Presenting Author: Heidemarie Laurent, University of Oregon; Jennifer C Ablow, University of Oregon

• Overlapping and Unique Neural Correlates of Parenting in New Fathers and Mothers and Related Infant Outcomes - Presenting Author: Pilyoung Kim, University of Denver; Paola Rigo, Psychology; James Leckman, Yale University; Linda C Mayes, Yale Univ Schl of Medicine; Pamela M Cole, Penn State Univ; Ruth Feldman, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan; James E. Swain, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor