The Neural Basis of Human Fatherhood: A Unique Biocultural Perspective on Plasticity of Brain and Behavior

Abraham, Eyal; Feldman, Ruth

doi:10.1007/s10567-022-00381-9

Cited by 24 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 115 publications

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“…These features define the highly flexible neurobiology of fatherhood. Studies have indicated that the biology of fatherhood shows not only high variability among species but also marked differences between individuals within each species (Horrell et al, 2018), creating bottom-up, behavior-based pathways in which parenting-related hormones and neural networks are triggered by exposure to infant stimuli and active caregiving (Abraham & Feldman, 2022).…”

Section: Fatherhood and Plasticitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While the ontogeny of social monogamy is not fully clear – it is observed in several unrelated lineages of species, including in rodents: prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster), mandarin vole (Lasiopodomys mandarinus), degu (Octodon degus), California mouse (Peromyscus californicus), Campbell’s dwarf hamster (Phodopus campbelli) and mongolian gerbil (Meriones unguiculatus), and in primates some lemur species, New World marmosets, tamarins, titi monkeys, and owl monkeys – the emergence of social monogamy enabled greater plasticity in the parental roles. Furthermore, social monogamy has led to the highly flexible neurobiology of paternal caregiving (Abraham et al, 2014; Feldman, 2015b; Horrell et al, 2018; Rosenbaum & Gettler, 2018; Saltzman & Ziegler, 2014), which, in turn, induces neural, hormonal, and behavioral plasticity in the offspring (Abraham & Feldman, 2022). Hormones that underpin maternal care, such as oxytocin and prolactin, which operate through evolutionary-conserved mechanisms, are similarly activated in fathers but in ways that are less obligatory and causal and in response to ongoing exposure to mother and infant (Bales & Saltzman, 2016; Feldman, 2019).…”

Section: The Three Tenets Of Resilience and The Father-specific Contr...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Father contribution to human resilience

Feldman¹

2023

Dev Psychopathol

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Fathers have been an important source of child endurance and prosperity since the dawn of civilization, promoting adaptation to social rules, defining cultural meaning systems, teaching daily living skills, and providing the material background against which children developed; still, the recent reformulation in the role of the father requires theory-building. Paternal caregiving is rare in mammals, occurring in 3–5% of species, expresses in multiple formats, and involves flexible neurobiological accommodations to ecological conditions and active caregiving. Here, we discuss father contribution to resilience across development. Our model proposes three tenets of resilience – plasticity, sociality, and meaning – and discussion focuses on father-specific contributions to each tenet at different developmental stages; newborn, infant, preschooler, child, and adolescent. Father’s style of high arousal, energetic physicality, guided participation in daily skills, joint adventure, and conflict resolution promotes children’s flexible approach and social competence within intimate bonds and social groups. By expanding children’s interests, sharpening cognitions, tuning affect regulation, encouraging exploration, and accompanying the search for identity, fathers support the sense of meaning, enhancing the human-specific dimension of resilience. We end by highlighting pitfalls to paternal contribution, including absence, abuse, rigidity, expectations, and gender typing, and the need to formulate novel theories to accommodate the “involved dad.”

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Section: Fatherhood and Plasticitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Three Tenets Of Resilience and The Father-specific Contr...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Father contribution to human resilience

Feldman¹

2023

Dev Psychopathol

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“…Yet, in a few mammalian species males exhibit paternal behavior, and many species display "alloparenting" or "cooperative breeding", in which relatives or conspecifics help to raise the offspring (Numan, 2020, Chapter 7). In humans, paternal investment is affected by socio-cultural and historical differences, as well as individual beliefs, producing behaviors that range from a father being fully absent to being the primary caregiver (Abraham & Feldman, 2022). Also, humans rely heavily on alloparents to provide childcare, including relatives like grandparents or siblings; adoptive and foster parents; and caregivers not related biologically, such as babysitters or teachers (Abraham & Feldman, 2018).…”

Section: Maternal Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

First-time fathers show longitudinal gray matter cortical volume reductions: evidence from two international samples

et al. 2022

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Emerging evidence points to the transition to parenthood as a critical window for adult neural plasticity. Studying fathers offers a unique opportunity to explore how parenting experience can shape the human brain when pregnancy is not directly experienced. Yet very few studies have examined the neuroanatomic adaptations of men transitioning into fatherhood. The present study reports on an international collaboration between two laboratories, one in Spain and the other in California (United States), that have prospectively collected structural neuroimaging data in 20 expectant fathers before and after the birth of their first child. The Spanish sample also included a control group of 17 childless men. We tested whether the transition into fatherhood entailed anatomical changes in brain cortical volume, thickness, and area, and subcortical volumes. We found overlapping trends of cortical volume reductions within the default mode network and visual networks and preservation of subcortical structures across both samples of first-time fathers, which persisted after controlling for fathers’ and children’s age at the postnatal scan. This study provides convergent evidence for cortical structural changes in fathers, supporting the possibility that the transition to fatherhood may represent a meaningful window of experience-induced structural neuroplasticity in males.

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“…A further comprehensive literature search reveals that a vast majority of the available studies on fathers’ processing of child distress cues actually center on (expectant) fathers’ hormonal and neural responses to infant distress cues, particularly crying (for reviews, see Abraham & Feldman, 2022; Bakermans-Kranenburg et al, 2019; Grande et al, 2020; Provenzi et al, 2021; Rilling & Mascaro, 2017). In contrast, fathers’ parenting emotion and cognition processes when coping with child distress as well as their potential roles in shaping paternal emotion-related parenting self-efficacy, which are the core parts of our proposed framework, have been rarely examined in previous studies.…”

Section: Evaluation Of the Potential Utility Of Our Proposed Model Fo...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Origins and development of maternal self-efficacy in emotion-related parenting during the transition to parenthood: Toward an integrative process framework beyond Bandura’s model.

Cao¹,

Leerkes²,

Zhou³

2023

Psychological Review

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For new mothers, coping with infant distress is challenging. Mothers' self-efficacy in emotion-related parenting plays critical roles in shaping their adaptation and children's development. Research on antecedents of maternal parenting self-efficacy has been predominantly based on the global self-efficacy theory outlined by Bandura in the 1970s. Despite the utility of Bandura's theory, subsequent research on emotion-related parenting has highlighted avenues for extending and adapting his model to more adequately elucidate the cognitive, affective, and behavioral processes underlying the development of maternal emotion-related parenting self-efficacy. In view of the basic and applied value of a clearer account of how new mothers' emotion-related parenting self-efficacy emerges and evolves, the increasing amount of research on this topic, and the absence of syntheses of extant studies, we reviewed relevant literature. First, constructs and propositions in prevailing theoretical perspectives are examined for their utility to elucidate the development of new mothers' emotion-related parenting self-efficacy, particularly the implicated cognitive, affective, and behavioral mechanisms and how they work together. Second, a framework is outlined that integrates strengths of various theories to delineate processes underlying the emergence and evolution of new mothers' emotion-related parenting self-efficacy. Third, findings across disparate studies are summarized to provide a foundation for the offered framework. To better inform future research, we demonstrated how to build testable mid-range models with substantive constructs and hypotheses from the proposed framework through deductive theorizing process. We also evaluated the utility of the proposed model for studying new fathers. Last, implications for future research and practice are discussed.

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The Neural Basis of Human Fatherhood: A Unique Biocultural Perspective on Plasticity of Brain and Behavior

Cited by 24 publications

References 115 publications

Father contribution to human resilience

Father contribution to human resilience

First-time fathers show longitudinal gray matter cortical volume reductions: evidence from two international samples

Origins and development of maternal self-efficacy in emotion-related parenting during the transition to parenthood: Toward an integrative process framework beyond Bandura’s model.

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