ArticleScientific reports2020
Brain Responses to Emotional Infant Faces in New Mothers and Nulliparous Women.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Neural variability across the transition to motherhood: Enhanced moment-to-moment neural variability during mentalizing in first-time mothers.Journal of neuroendocrinology · 2026Article
- Altered functional connectivity of emotional circuits and default mode network in postpartum women: a resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging study.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- My Baby Versus the World: Fathers' Neural Processing of Own-Infant, Unfamiliar-Infant, and Romantic Partner Stimuli.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Maladaptive mother-child interactions in mothers with remitted major depression are associated with blunted amygdala responses to child affective facial expressions.Psychological medicine · 2025Article
- Validation of the Edited Tromsø Infant Faces Database (E-TIF): A study on differences in the processing of children's emotional expressions.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Maternal History of Childhood Maltreatment and Brain Responses to Infant Cues Across the Postpartum Period.Child maltreatment · 2024Article
- Task-residual effective connectivity of motor network in transient ischemic attack.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Cannabis use during pregnancy and hemodynamic responses to infant cues in pregnancy: an exploratory study.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Gender differences in brain response to infant emotional faces.BMC neuroscience · 2022Article
- Empathy for others versus for one's child: Associations with mothers' brain activation during a social cognitive task and with their toddlers' functioning.Developmental psychobiology · 2022Article
- Stronger brain activation for own baby but similar activation toward babies of own and different ethnicities in parents living in a multicultural environment.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Motherhood and theory of mind: increased activation in the posterior cingulate cortex and insulae.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- Increased activation in the bilateral anterior insulae in response to others in pain in mothers compared to non-mothers.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Neuroprotective Effects of Motherhood on Brain Function in Late Life: A Resting-State fMRI Study.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2021Article
- Postpartum Depression Is Associated With Altered Neural Connectivity Between Affective and Mentalizing Regions During Mother-Infant Interactions.Frontiers in global women's health · 2021Article
- Alexithymia and Facial Mimicry in Response to Infant and Adult Affect-Expressive Faces.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The experience of motherhood is one of the most salient events in a woman's life. Motherhood is associated with a series of neurophysiological, psychological, and behavioral changes that allow women to better adapt to their new role as mothers. Infants communicate their needs and physiological states mainly through salient emotional expressions, and maternal responses to infant signals are critical for infant survival and development. In this study, we investigated the whole brain functional response to emotional infant faces in 20 new mothers and 22 nulliparous women during functional magnetic resonance imaging scans. New mothers showed higher brain activation in regions involved in infant facial expression processing and empathic and mentalizing networks than nulliparous women. Furthermore, magnitudes of the activation of the left parahippocampal gyrus and the left fusiform gyrus, recruited during facial expression processing, were positively correlated with empathic concern (EC) scores in new mothers when viewing emotional (happy-sad) faces contrasted to neutral faces. Taken together, these results indicate that the experience of being a mother affects human brain responses in visual and social cognitive brain areas and in brain areas associated with theory-of-mind related and empathic processing.
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