Increased activation in the bilateral anterior insulae in response to others in pain in mothers compared to non-mothers

Plank, Irene Sophia; Attar, Catherine Hindi; Kunas, Stefanie L.; Dziobek, Isabel; Bermpohl, Felix

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-02162-w

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 83 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Then, they filled out questionnaires to measure emotion regulation (ERQ; Abler & Kessler, 2009), relationship attachment (ECR‐RS; Fraley, Heffernan, Vicary, & Brumbaugh, 2011), social desirability (KSE‐G; Kemper, Beierlein, Bensch, Kovaleva, & Rammstedt, 2012), alexithymia (TAS‐20; Popp et al, 2008) as well as trait empathy and perspective‐taking (both IRI; Paulus, 2009). Last, they performed two tasks in the scanner, an empathy for pain task (Plank, Hindi Attar, Kunas, Dziobek, & Bermpohl, 2021a) and the here presented task of which the ToM condition has been published separately (Plank, Hindi Attar, Kunas, Dziobek, & Bermpohl, 2021b). In the empathy for pain task, participants saw children and adults in painful or non‐painful situations showing body parts.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Increased child‐evoked activation in the precuneus during facial affect recognition in mothers

Plank

Attar

Kunas

et al. 2022

Human Brain Mapping

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Successful parenting requires constant inferring of affective states. Especially vital is the correct identification of facial affect. Previous studies have shown that infant faces are processed preferentially compared to adult faces both on the behavioural and the neural level. This study specifically investigates the child‐evoked neural responses to affective faces and their modulation by motherhood and attention to affect. To do so, we used a paradigm to measure neural responses during both explicit and implicit facial affect recognition (FAR) in mothers and non‐mothers using child and adult faces. Increased activation to child compared to adult faces was found for mothers and non‐mothers in face processing areas (bilateral fusiform gyri) and areas associated with social understanding (bilateral insulae and medial superior frontal gyrus) when pooling implicit and explicit affect recognition. Furthermore, this child‐evoked activation was modulated by motherhood with an increase in mothers compared to non‐mothers in the left precuneus. Additionally, explicitly recognising the affect increased child‐evoked activation in the medial superior frontal gyrus in both mothers and non‐mothers. These results suggest preferential treatment of affective child over adult faces, modulated by motherhood and attention to affect.

show abstract

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These processes are referred to as social understanding. Social understanding has been shown to be modulated by the target (e.g., infant vs. adult, Proverbio, Brignone, Matarazzo, Del Zotto, & Zani, 2006) and the perceiver (e.g., mother vs. non‐mother, Plank, Hindi Attar, et al, 2021a; Plank, Hindi Attar, et al, 2021b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Increased child‐evoked activation in the precuneus during facial affect recognition in mothers

Plank

Attar

Kunas

et al. 2022

Human Brain Mapping

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…These processes are referred to as social understanding. Social understanding has been shown to be modulated by the target (e.g., infant vs. adult, Proverbio, Brignone, Matarazzo, Del Zotto, & Zani, 2006) and the perceiver (e.g., mother vs. non-mother, Plank, Hindi Attar, et al, 2021a;Plank, Hindi Attar, et al, 2021b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Then, they filled out questionnaires to measure emotion regulation (ERQ;Abler & Kessler, 2009), relationship attachment (ECR-RS;Fraley, Heffernan, Vicary, & Brumbaugh, 2011), social desirability (KSE-G;Kemper, Beierlein, Bensch, Kovaleva, & Rammstedt, 2012), alexithymia (TAS-20;Popp et al, 2008) as well as trait empathy and perspective-taking (both IRI;Paulus, 2009). Last, they performed two tasks in the scanner, an empathy for pain task(Plank, Hindi Attar, Kunas, Dziobek, & Bermpohl, 2021a) and the here presented task of which the ToM condition has been published separately(Plank, Hindi Attar, Kunas, Dziobek, & Bermpohl, 2021b). In the empathy for pain task, participants saw children and adults in painful or non-painful situations showing body parts.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Increased child-evoked activation in the precuneus during facial affect recognition in mothers

Plank¹,

Attar²,

Kunas³

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Successful parenting requires constant inferring of affective states. Especially vital is the correct identification of facial affect. Previous studies have shown that infant faces are processed preferentially compared to adult faces both on the behavioural and the neural level. This study aims to specifically investigate the child-evoked neural responses to affective faces and their modulation by motherhood and attention to affect. To do so, we used a paradigm to measure neural responses during both explicit and implicit facial affect recognition in mothers and non-mothers using child and adult faces. Increased activation to child as compared to adult faces was found for mothers and non-mothers in face processing areas (bilateral fusiform gyri) and areas associated with social understanding (bilateral insulae and medial superior frontal gyrus) when pooling implicit and explicit affect recognition. This child-evoked activation was modulated by motherhood with an increase in mothers as compared to non-mothers in the left precuneus. Additionally, explicitly recognising the affect led to increased child-evoked activation in the medial superior frontal gyrus as in both mothers and non-mothers. These results suggest preferential treatment of affective child over adult faces, which is modulated by motherhood and attention to affect.

show abstract

Mothers need more information to recognise associated emotions in child facial expressions

Plank

Christiansen

Kunas

et al. 2022

Cognition and Emotion

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Infant and child faces receive more attention than adult faces, especially when they are portraying emotions. This preferential treatment is increased in mothers. It is unclear how this affects the ability to recognise child emotions and at which age children lose this preferential treatment. Using morphed videos where a neutral face continually and gradually takes on an emotion, we were able to quantify the amount of information needed to identify the emotion. We investigated amount of information needed as well as accuracy both separately and as an integrated performance score. We expected mothers to perform better than non-mothers and both groups to perform better when encountering adolescents as compared to children. We also hypothesised an interaction with the difference between mothers and non-mothers being larger for pre-schoolers than for adolescents.Both groups indeed performed better when recognising the emotions of adolescents than of preschoolers possibly due to their increasingly adult features. Contrary to our hypotheses, mothers performed worse than non-mothers in every age group due to their need for more information to identify the emotions with the same level as accuracy as non-mothers. Both groups performed similarly on a control task where they had to identify animals instead of emotions. This indicates that mothers need more information for affect recognition specifically and not for similar tasks not involving emotions. A possible explanation is that emotional child faces have a greater emotional impact on mothers than non-mothers leading to task interference. Further research is needed to examine possible causes of this effect including differences in affective social understanding as well as whether the effect extends to adult faces.

show abstract

Increased activation in the bilateral anterior insulae in response to others in pain in mothers compared to non-mothers

Cited by 3 publications

References 83 publications

Increased child‐evoked activation in the precuneus during facial affect recognition in mothers

Increased child‐evoked activation in the precuneus during facial affect recognition in mothers

Increased child-evoked activation in the precuneus during facial affect recognition in mothers

Mothers need more information to recognise associated emotions in child facial expressions

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About