Neural Response To Infant Emtional Stimuli In Chinese New Mothers

The new-born babies and young infants communicate their needs and physiological states mainly through baby babbling, baby crying, baby laughing and facial expression. New mothers appropriate responding to emotional infant signals is vital to child healthy psychological development. However, it is unclear that whether new mothers are more sensitive to infant vocalizing and facial expression. Thus, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate the differences in brain activations in response to infant emotional sound and facial expression between new mothers and nulliparous women.We recruited 47 new mothers whose infant was less than one year old and 25 nulliparous women participated in the study. In the first experiment, affective pictures including baby laughing face, baby crying face and neutral pictures were presented to participants during fMRI scanning. In the second experiment, participants passively listened to baby babbling, baby crying, baby laughing and white noise during fMRI scanning. Functional images were analyzed with statistical parametric mapping software (SPM8) and MATLAB software on a personal computer.The scores of interpersonal reactivity index were no significant difference between groups both in experiment 1 and experiment 2. In the experiment 1, compared to nulliparous women, new mothers showed increased activation in the brain regions involved in emotional processing and visual areas, which suggest new mothers may be more sensitive to infant’s facial expression. In the second fMRI study, new mothers showed greater deactivation in the default mode network than nulliparous women during listening infant sounds minus white noise sound. Our findings suggest that new mothers would pay more attention to infant emotional sounds. These results from two experiments revealed that different brain processes underlying responsiveness to infant emotional stimuli in new mother and nulliparous women, and showed that new mothers would more sensitive to infant vocalizing and facial expression.