Highlights d Calcitonin receptor and its ligand amylin are expressed in the medial preoptic area d Calcitonin receptor + neurons are essential for maternal and alloparental care d Both calcitonin receptor and amylin are upregulated in postpartum mother mice d Calcitonin receptor upregulation takes part in risk-taking

Oxytocin facilitates allo-parental behavior under stress in laboratory mice Abbreviated Title (50 character maximum)Oxytocin, vasopressin and parental care 3. List all Author Names and Affiliations in order as they would appear in the published article

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Oxytocin, a neuropeptide hormone, is indispensable for milk ejection during nursing and is important for uterine contractions during parturition. The exact functions of oxytocin in postpartum maternal behaviors and motivations require further investigation. To this end, we characterized the role of oxytocin in components of maternal motivations during the mid‐postpartum period, which has not been previously studied. To maintain suckling stimuli, postpartum oxytocin knockout (Oxt−/−) and heterozygous (Oxt+/−) littermates were co‐housed with a wild‐type lactating mother and its litter, and were examined for their ability to retrieve pups under standard or high‐risk conditions, nursing behavior, maternal aggression towards an unfamiliar intruder, and motivation to regain contact with separated pups. One‐third of Oxt−/− mothers exhibited prolonged parturition but were otherwise grossly healthy. Despite their inability to eject milk, Oxt−/− mothers displayed nursing behaviors for similar durations to Oxt+/− mothers during the second postpartum week. In addition, Oxt−/− mothers were essentially intact for pup retrieval under standard conditions and were motivated to stay close to pups, although they showed a mild decrease in maternal care under high‐risk conditions and increased anxiety‐like behaviors in pup‐related contexts. The present findings indicate that oxytocin is dispensable for nursing behavior and maternal motivations, yet suggest that oxytocin may be relevant for stress resilience in the postpartum period.

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Children’s physical, cognitive, and emotional maturation require adequate interactions and secure attachment with their primary caregivers. However, the causal relationships between parenting components and the aspects of infant attachment behaviors toward the caregiver remain unclear. New World monkey common marmosets provide an ideal model of human parent-infant relations because, like humans, infant care is shared among family members using intricate vocal communications. Combining the natural variations in parenting styles and subsecond-scale analyses of dyadic vocal and physical interactions, we demonstrate that marmoset infants signal their need by the social context-dependent use of call types and by exhibiting physical avoidance to rejective and neglectful caregivers. When deprived of an early social environment, infants cannot develop the adaptive use of attachment behaviors or age-appropriate autonomy. These data demonstrate the critical role of social contexts and developmental dynamics in physical and vocal attachment behaviors in infancy.TeaserMarmoset infants modulate their attachment behaviors toward each caregiver, according to their inherent parenting styles.

This paper investigates how various factors affect the quality of synthetic speech produced by rules. Using rules to synthesize speech will be an important technique for providing various telecommunication services in future intelligent networks. The quality of synthetic speech is generally measured by subjectively evaluating the speech from the viewpoint of intelligibility, or by comparing it with the quality of other types of synthetic speech. However, the development of a practical speech synthesis method for use in telecommunication networks requires an overall quality evaluation, including intelligibility and naturalness. The quality should be compared with that of natural telephone speech. To establish an overall quality evaluation method, the effects of several factors on the overall quality (expressed by MOS) of speech synthesized by several Japanese text-to-speech systems are quantitatively compared with the effects of using additive speech-correlated white noise as a natural speech material. Experimental results show that such factors as subject, listening experience, average pitch frequency, and text affect synthetic speech more than natural speech. Quality evaluation characteristics due to these factors are discussed and an overall quality evaluation method for synthetic speech is proposed.