Poster #24 - Oxytocin decrease pre-to-post parent-infant interaction is related to elevated neural responses to sad infant faces

• In Event: Poster Session 11

Abstract

Background: The ability to pick up social cues, especially negative cues, from preverbal infants’ facial expressions is important for sensitive and timely caregiving, which is essential in building healthy parent-infant attachments and can influence infants’ future development. Previous studies found that neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) is related to the processing of social cues, the stress parents experienced during interaction, and parenting behaviors (Elmadih et al., 2014; Feldman et al., 2010; Tully et al., 2018). However, the direction of the relationship between OT and optimal parenting remained unclear due to inconsistencies in study designs (natural parent-infant interaction and stressful situations like still-face paradigm and separation) and in coding schemes (macro and micro coding). The present study aimed to test the relationship between parents’ OT reactions to a natural parent-infant interaction and 1) macro-coded parenting behaviors during the target interaction; 2) parents’ neural responses to different infants’ facial expressions. To further explore whether the relationship is specifically related to infant stimuli, we also included an adult face emotions task.
Methods: 43 birthing-parents (M±SD age=24.94±4.88 years) and their infants (M±SD age=3.52±1.77 months, 60.5% female) were videotaped at their homes during a 15-minute interaction, two saliva samples for OT measurement were collected from parents before and after the target interaction. Parenting behaviors were coded from the videos with the Emotional Availability scale (EA, Biringen et al., 2008). Parents’ neural responses to different infant face emotions (happy, sad, and neutral) and to different adult face emotions (angry, fearful, happy, and neutral) were collected in a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner.
Results: Results indicated a significant decrease in saliva OT levels post interaction (t(42) = 2.05, p < .05) this decrease was positively correlated with parental Sensitivity (r(41) = . 42, p < .01) and parental Structuring (r(41) = . 31, p < .01) from EA codings. Whole-brain analysis indicated a significant oxytocin decrease x emotion (happy, sad, neutral) interaction in the left lingual gyrus, and left cuneus to infant faces at p < .05 corrected (90 voxels; x, y, z = 19.5L, 64.5P, 2.5S); no such significant interactions were found for neural responses to adult faces. Post-hoc correlations revealed that decrease in oxytocin levels was positively associated with increased neural activities to sad infant faces (r(41) = .43, p = .011). Oxytocin decrease was not associated with activation in response to infant happy faces (p > .05) or neutral faces (p > .05).
Conclusion: Our findings suggested that in new parents, oxytocin decreased during a natural parent-infant interaction, and this decrease was positively associated with optimal parenting both in elevated neural responses to negative infant stimuli and in macro-coded parental sensitivity and structuring. In addition, this relationship was only present for infant facial stimuli but not emotional face cues in general. Our results were consistent with previous findings of OT and parenting stress during caregiving. These results supported the relationship between oxytocin and parenting behaviors, which permitted possibilities for intervention studies to help parents building healthy relationships with infants and help with infant development.

Authors

• Yun Xie, University of Denver
  Presenting Author

• Leah A Grande

• Tom Yeh, University of Colorado-Boulder

• Pilyoung Kim, University of Denver