Gender differences in physiological reactivity to infant cries and smiles in military families

Brewster, Albert L; Nelson, John P.; McCanne, Thomas R.; Lucas, D R; Milner, Joel S.

doi:10.1016/s0145-2134(98)00055-6

Cited by 33 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Such a divergence of gender-independent rating data but gender-dependent physiological measures was previously reported for parents as well as nonparents listening to infant laughing and crying [Brewster et al, 1998; but see Frodi, 1985;Seifritz et al, 2003], and also for viewing broader sets of emotional pictures [Bradley et al, 2001;Kemp et al, 2004;Wrase et al, 2003]. This suggests the possibility that men and women do not activate brain structures differently because of different emotional attitudes towards laughing and crying, but because of different behavioral dispositions as a consequence of hearing such stimr Sander et al r r 1018 r uli.…”

Section: Influence Of Listener's Gender On Brain Areas Of Activationmentioning

confidence: 50%

FMRI activations of amygdala, cingulate cortex, and auditory cortex by infant laughing and crying

Sander¹,

Frome²,

Scheich³

2007

Human Brain Mapping

112

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One of the functions of emotional vocalizations is the regulation of social relationships like those between adults and children. Listening to infant vocalizations is known to engage amygdala as well as anterior and posterior cingulate cortices. But, the functional relationships between these structures still need further clarification. Here, nonparental women and men listened to laughing and crying of preverbal infants and to vocalization-derived control stimuli, while performing a pure tone detection task during low-noise functional magnetic resonance imaging. Infant vocalizations elicited stronger activation in amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) of women, whereas the alienated control stimuli elicited stronger activation in men. Independent of listeners' gender, auditory cortex (AC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) were more strongly activated by the control stimuli than by infant laughing or crying. The gender-dependent correlates of neural activity in amygdala and ACC may reflect neural predispositions in women for responses to preverbal infant vocalizations, whereas the gender-independent similarity of activation patterns in PCC and AC may reflect more sensory-based and cognitive levels of neural processing. In comparison to our previous work on adult laughing and crying, the infant vocalizations elicited manifold higher amygdala activation.

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Section: Influence Of Listener's Gender On Brain Areas Of Activationmentioning

confidence: 50%

FMRI activations of amygdala, cingulate cortex, and auditory cortex by infant laughing and crying

Sander¹,

Frome²,

Scheich³

2007

Human Brain Mapping

112

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Passively listening to sounds deactivates the DMN and, based on the saliency of the ongoing stimulation, the deactivation of the DMN increases with the saliency of sounds (Di & Biswal, 2014; Menon & Uddin, 2010; Sridharan et al, 2008). Although some physiological studies that tested reactions to baby crying showed inconsistent findings on gender differences (Boukydis & Burgess, 1982; Brewster, Nelson, McCanne, Lucas, & Milner, 1998; Frodi et al, 1978; Out et al, 2010), other recent investigations focused on more adaptive reactions to distressed sounds highlight clearer differences between genders (Byrd-Craven, Auer, & Kennison, 2014; Tkaczyszyn et al, 2012). For example, a study aimed to test physiological reactions to negative sounds, such as baby cries and sounds of violence, in non-parents, reported that women showed a substantial decrease of heart rate variability–high frequency (HRV-HF) while listening to baby crying compared to men (Tkaczyszyn et al, 2012).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Brain processes in women and men in response to emotive sounds

Rigo

Pisapia

Bornstein

et al. 2016

Social Neuroscience

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Adult appropriate responding to salient infant signals is vital to child healthy psychological development. Here we investigated how infant crying, relative to other emotive sounds of infant laughing or adult crying, captures adults’ brain resources. In a sample of nulliparous women and men, we investigated the effects of different sounds on cerebral activation of the default mode network (DMN) and reaction times (RTs) while listeners engaged in self-referential decision and syllabic counting tasks, which, respectively, require the activation or deactivation of the DMN. Sounds affect women and men differently. In women, infant crying deactivated the DMN during the self-referential decision task; in men, female adult crying interfered with the DMN during the syllabic counting task. These findings point to different brain processes underlying responsiveness to crying in women and men and show that cerebral activation is modulated by situational contexts in which crying occurs.

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“…Mothers and fathers were highly accurate in recognizing their own infant's cries, but only mothers were able to identify the cry type accurately (Weisenfeld, Zander-Malatesta, & DeLoach, 1981). When exposed to longer, videotaped segments of unfamiliar crying infants, fathers showed greater physiological reactivity than mothers (Brewster, Nelson, McCanne, Lucas, & Milner, 1998), a pattern that is sometimes thought to set the stage for physical abuse (Frodi & Lamb, 1980). Taken together, these studies suggest that mothers are physiologically primed to respond to infant crying with caregiving.…”

Section: Crying As a Means Of Eliciting Carementioning

confidence: 87%

An ethological analysis of human infant crying: Answering Tinbergen's four questions

Zeifman

2001

Developmental Psychobiology

172

160

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The proximate causes, survival value, ontogeny, and evolutionary history of human infant crying are examined. Experiments and field observations involving infant distress vocalizations and begging calls in avian, mammalian, and nonhuman primate species are considered, as are ethnographic records of infant care and responses to crying in nonindustrialized societies. It is argued that human infant crying evolved as a primarily acoustic, graded signal, that it is a fairly reliable, if imperfect, indicator of need for parental care and that its primary function is to promote parental caregiving. Selection pressures that may have shaped the evolution of crying and its potential for corruption through dishonesty also are discussed.

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Gender differences in physiological reactivity to infant cries and smiles in military families

Cited by 33 publications

References 22 publications

FMRI activations of amygdala, cingulate cortex, and auditory cortex by infant laughing and crying

FMRI activations of amygdala, cingulate cortex, and auditory cortex by infant laughing and crying

Brain processes in women and men in response to emotive sounds

An ethological analysis of human infant crying: Answering Tinbergen's four questions

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