Maternal affect and quality of parenting experiences are related to amygdala response to infant faces

Abstract

We examined how individual differences in mood and anxiety in the early postpartum period are related to brain response to infant stimuli during fMRI, with particular focus on regions implicated in both maternal behavior and mood/anxiety, that is, the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) and the amygdala. At approximately 3 months postpartum, 22 mothers completed an affect-rating task (ART) during fMRI, where their affective response to infant stimuli was explicitly probed. Mothers viewed/rated four infant face conditions: own positive (OP), own negative (ON), unfamiliar positive (UP), and unfamiliar negative (UN). Mood and anxiety were measured by the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EDPS) and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory-Trait Version (STAI-T); maternal factors related to parental stress and attachment were also assessed. Brain-imaging data underwent a random-effects analysis, and cluster-based statistical thresholding was applied to the following contrasts: OP-UP, ON-UN, OP-ON, and UP-UN. Our main finding was that poorer quality of maternal experience was significantly related to reduced amygdala response to OP compared to UP infant faces. Our results suggest that, in human mothers, infant-related amygdala function may be an important factor in maternal anxiety/mood, in quality of mothering, and in individual differences in the motivation to mother. We are very grateful to the staff at the Imaging Research Center of the Brain-Body Institute for their contributions to this project. This work was supported by an Ontario Mental Health Foundation operating grant awarded to Alison Fleming and a postdoctoral fellowship awarded to Jennifer Barrett.

Maternal anxiety and neural responses to infant faces

“…A recent behavioral report found that relative to healthy controls, mothers with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) evidenced heightened sensitivity to the detection of happy infant emotional expressions in a perceptual morphing task, with comparable detection performance to controls in respect of sad infant faces (Arteche et al, 2011). In contrast, lower levels of trait anxiety were found to be associated with greater amygdala activity when mothers viewed photographs of their own infant smiling compared to an unfamiliar infant smiling (Barrett et al, 2011). With respect to infant and adult emotional face perception, one study of maternal depressed mood in the postpartum period reported that across the sample, state anxiety was most commonly associated with the evaluation of these facial stimuli; specifically, there were positive correlations between state anxiety and evaluations of disgust and sad infant faces expressing negative emotions, and an inverse correlation between state anxiety and evaluations of neutral infant expressions (Gil et al, 2011).…”

The neural basis of responsive caregiving behaviour: Investigating temporal dynamics within the parental brain

“…However, not all findings relating to the amygdala have been in the same direction. Barrett and colleagues [129] reported that greater amygdala activity to own positive infant faces was related to lower maternal anxiety, lower parental distress, fewer symptoms of depressed mood, and more positive attachment feelings. Another study found a negative correlation between amygdala response to faces, albeit adult only, and postpartum depression severity, and a negative correlation between amygdala response to faces and infant-related hostility [130].…”

The role of maternal executive function.

“…Childhood exposure to neglect was also associated with lower maternal warmth, and exposure to IPV was related to greater psychological aggression and corporal punishment (Barrett et al, 2012). In a large, longitudinal study, reports of childhood emotional abuse was associated with decreased responsivity and empathy and positively associated with maternal punishment (Bert et al, 2009).…”