Processing Children’s Faces in the Parental Brain: A Meta-Analysis of ERP Studies

• In Event: 1-073 - The Neural Basis of Parenting: Event-Related Potentials and Maternal Behavior

Integrative Statement

Background: The transition to parenthood is associated with neural and hormonal changes supporting sensitive caregiving and responsivity to infant signals. In recent years, an emerging number of studies have measured event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate early neural responses to child stimuli in the parental brain. By measuring ERPs to child face stimuli, studies have reported whether parents vs. adults without children show different neural responses to child faces, whether parental ERP responses are heightened in response to images of one’s own child, and whether variation in parental ERP responses to child faces is associated with indicators of parenting quality, such as observed parental sensitivity or attachment security. We used meta-analysis to quantify the available pool of studies and to address major questions related to parenthood and neural responses to children’s faces.

Methods: A literature search for ERP studies involving parents was conducted. The main inclusion criteria were that the study was required to report ERP responses to children’s faces, include parents as participants, and report data on the face-sensitive N170 ERP component or the LPP (or P3) component associated with attention allocation. A total of 21 studies were included, which provided effect size information for three analyses: 1) ERP differences to child faces between parents and non-parents (k = 3-4, depending on the ERP component), 2) ERP differences to own vs. other-child faces within parents (k = 6-8), and 3) correlations between ERP amplitudes to child faces and indicators of parenting quality (k = 9-10). The analyses were restricted to the N170 and LPP/P3 components as these ERP components are most commonly reported. The indicators of parenting quality ranged from observed sensitivity (e.g., Bernard et al., 2015) to attachment security (Groh & Haydon, 2018) and self-reported parental reflective functioning (Rutherford et al., 2016).

Results: In initial analyses of all available data, examination of funnel plots and a p-curve analysis indicated evidential value for the current set of results and an absence of publication bias. In analysis 1, parents showed larger N170 amplitudes to child faces than non-parents, whereas the small number of studies reporting LPP differences between parents and non-parents produced mixed findings with a non-significant combined effect size. Within parents (analysis 2), N170 amplitudes were not different between own vs. other-child faces. LPP amplitudes were consistently larger to own-child faces across studies, indicating greater attention to pictures of one’s own child. Finally, analysis 3 indicated small but positive associations between N170 and LPP amplitudes to child faces and indicators of parenting quality. Particularly the LPP amplitudes were more consistently associated with parenting measures when pictures of unfamiliar (vs. own) children served as stimuli.

Conclusions: Apart from the robust finding of larger LPP responses to own-child faces across multiple studies, the available evidence base is mixed particularly with respect to the relations between ERP responses to child faces and indicators of parenting quality. The current meta-analysis may guide future efforts to build powerful study designs for effectively capturing parenting-related variation in ERP responses to children’s social signals.

Authors

• Mikko J. Peltola, Tampere University
  Presenting Author

• Marian J Bakermans-Kranenburg, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
  Non-Presenting Author

• Renske Huffmeijer, Leiden University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marinus H van IJzendoorn, Erasmus University Rotterdam
  Non-Presenting Author