ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Synchronous caregiving from birth to adulthood tunes humans' social brain.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 41 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
41 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 80 citations in OpenAlex.
- A Review on the Vagus Nerve and Autonomic Nervous System During Fetal Development: Searching for Critical Windows.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2021Pooled it
- Cognitive Reappraisal and Expressive Suppression Evoke Distinct Neural Connections during Interpersonal Emotion Regulation.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Trial
- Maternal Social Support Reshapes the Offspring Brain Transcriptome to Buffer Prenatal Stress in Mice.Research square · 2026Article
- Embodied Neuropsychodynamics of the Relational Self Across Space and Time: An Integrative Narrative Review.Brain sciences · 2026Review
- A shift in brain functional systems during mother-child neural synchrony marks children's cognitive development.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Shaping the bodily self: exploring the influence of early attachment experiences on body ownership.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Synchronisation of circadian timing in families and the impact of autism: a scoping review.Journal of neurodevelopmental disorders · 2026Article
- Postpartum Depressive Symptoms and Mother-Infant Bonding: A Mixed-Methods Study Among Postpartum Women in Ghana.Nursing research and practice · 2026Article
- A developmental framework of interpersonal neural synchrony.Developmental review : DR · 2025Article
- Empathy aligns brains in synchrony.iScience · 2025Article
- Adverse Childhood Experiences Reported by Spouses of Persons Living With Dementia and Their Association With Care-Related Strain.Journal of gerontological nursing · 2025Article
- Individual patterns and synchrony of heart rate variability in adolescent patients with borderline personality psychopathology and their mothers: a case-control study.Borderline personality disorder and emotion dysregulation · 2025Article
- Synchrony Across Brains.Annual review of psychology · 2025Review
- Sensitive infant care tunes a frontotemporal interbrain network in adolescence.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Empathic Care of Neonates: A Critical Literature Review.The Permanente journal · 2024Review
- Parent-child couples display shared neural fingerprints while listening to stories.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Touch medicine: bridging the gap between recent insights from touch research and clinical medicine and its special significance for the treatment of affective disorders.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Review
- Maternal interoceptive focus is associated with greater reported engagement in mother-infant stroking and rocking.PloS one · 2024Article
- Associations between childhood ethnoracial minority density, cortical thickness, and social engagement among minority youth at clinical high-risk for psychosis.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2023Article
- Attachment Reminders Trigger Widespread Synchrony across Multiple Brains.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Mammalian young are born with immature brain and rely on the mother's body and caregiving behavior for maturation of neurobiological systems that sustain adult sociality. While research in animal models indicated the long-term effects of maternal contact and caregiving on the adult brain, little is known about the effects of maternal-newborn contact and parenting behavior on social brain functioning in human adults. We followed human neonates, including premature infants who initially lacked or received maternal-newborn skin-to-skin contact and full-term controls, from birth to adulthood, repeatedly observing mother-child social synchrony at key developmental nodes. We tested the brain basis of affect-specific empathy in young adulthood and utilized multivariate techniques to distinguish brain regions sensitive to others' distinct emotions from those globally activated by the empathy task. The amygdala, insula, temporal pole (TP), and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) showed high sensitivity to others' distinct emotions. Provision of maternal-newborn contact enhanced social synchrony across development from infancy and up until adulthood. The experience of synchrony, in turn, predicted the brain's sensitivity to emotion-specific empathy in the amygdala and insula, core structures of the social brain. Social synchrony linked with greater empathic understanding in adolescence, which was longitudinally associated with higher neural sensitivity to emotion-specific empathy in TP and VMPFC. Findings demonstrate the centrality of synchronous caregiving, by which infants practice the detection and sharing of others' affective states, for tuning the human social brain, particularly in regions implicated in salience detection, interoception, and mentalization that underpin affect sharing and human attachment.
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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.