SynthesisArchives of women's mental health2019
Neural pathways of maternal responding: systematic review and meta-analysis.
Synthesis in Archives of women's mental health, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 41 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neural Correlates of Maternal Posttraumatic Stress in the First Postpartum Year: Blunted Salience and Prefrontal Responses to Infant Distress.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2026Article
- Parental brain responses to own and unknown children's emotional facial expressions: An fMRI study.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Infant caregiving, relational factors, mood, and pain in perinatal opioid use disorder: A prospective cohort with ecological momentary assessment.Addictive behaviors · 2026Article
- Neural variability across the transition to motherhood: Enhanced moment-to-moment neural variability during mentalizing in first-time mothers.Journal of neuroendocrinology · 2026Article
- My Baby Versus the World: Fathers' Neural Processing of Own-Infant, Unfamiliar-Infant, and Romantic Partner Stimuli.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Protective role of parenthood on age-related brain function in mid- to late-life.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The maternal brain is more flexible and responsive at rest: effective connectivity of the parental caregiving network in postpartum mothers.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Neural activation to infant cry among Latina and non-Latina White mothers.Behavioural brain research · 2023Article
- Trait coping styles and the maternal neural and behavioral sensitivity to an infant.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- The Neurobiological Basis of Love: A Meta-Analysis of Human Functional Neuroimaging Studies of Maternal and Passionate Love.Brain sciences · 2022Review
- Less can be more: Fine tuning the maternal brain.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2022Review
- Why do mothers never stop grieving for their deceased children? Enduring alterations of brain connectivity and function.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
- Recent Neuroscience Advances in Human Parenting.Advances in neurobiology · 2022Article
- Maternal perinatal anxiety and neural responding to infant affective signals: Insights, challenges, and a road map for neuroimaging research.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2021Review
- Parent and Peer Emotion Responsivity Styles: An Extension of Gottman's Emotion Socialization Parenting Typologies.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- How stress can influence brain adaptations to motherhood.Frontiers in neuroendocrinology · 2021Review
- Associations between stress exposure and new mothers' brain responses to infant cry sounds.NeuroImage · 2020Article
- The maternal brain: Region-specific patterns of brain aging are traceable decades after childbirth.Human brain mapping · 2020Article
- Neural Responses to Infant Emotions and Emotional Self-Awareness in Mothers and Fathers during Pregnancy.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2020Article
- Adaptations in reward-related behaviors and mesolimbic dopamine function during motherhood and the postpartum period.Frontiers in neuroendocrinology · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
12 authors at 5 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has increasingly been employed to establish whether there is a specific brain neural network dedicated to maternal responsiveness. We undertook systematic review and meta-analysis of all studies in which healthy new mothers were exposed to visual stimuli of own versus other infants to determine the quality of evidence for a dedicated maternal neural network. Systematic literature review revealed a pattern of specific neural responses commonly induced by visual infant paradigms. Brain areas consistently reported as activated in mothers in response to own versus unknown infant included the left thalamus, bilateral pre-central gyrus, left limbic lobe, uncus, amygdala and left caudate. These regions are implicated in reward, attention, emotion processing and other core social cognitive skills. Meta-analysis, however, revealed a more limited subset of brain areas activated in mothers specifically in response to their own versus unknown infant and suggested considerable inter-study variability. Further work is needed if functional imaging is to become an objective tool for the assessment of neural pathways associated with distinct patterns of maternal care behaviour. Such a tool would be invaluable in developing biomarkers of neural activity associated with healthy maternal care and for monitoring treatment/intervention effects of costly parenting interventions.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.