ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2022
Motherhood and theory of mind: increased activation in the posterior cingulate cortex and insulae.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 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
- Generating Biologically Relevant Subtypes of Autism Spectrum Disorder with differential responses to Acute Oxytocin Administration in a Randomized Trial using Random Forest Models and K-means Clustering.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Interactive behavior in mothers with and without borderline personality disorder: non-hostile behavior is associated with stronger neural activation of the theory of mind network in response to sad faces of the own child.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Enduring maternal brain changes and their role in mediating motherhood's impact on well-being.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Learning from in-group and out-group models induces separative effects on human mate copying.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
- Mapping and understanding of correlated electroencephalogram (EEG) responses to the newsvendor problem.Scientific reports · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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Abstract
Despite growing evidence on effects of parenthood on social understanding, little is known about the influence of parenthood on theory of mind (ToM), the capacity to infer mental and affective states of others. It is also unclear whether any possible effects of parenthood on ToM would generalise to inferring states of adults or are specific to children. We investigated neural activation in mothers and women without children while they predicted action intentions from child and adult faces. Region-of-interest analyses showed stronger activation in mothers in the bilateral posterior cingulate cortex, precuneus (ToM-related areas) and insulae (emotion-related areas). Whole-brain analyses revealed that mothers compared to non-mothers more strongly activated areas including the left angular gyrus and the ventral prefrontal cortex but less strongly activated the right supramarginal gyrus and the dorsal prefrontal cortex. These differences were not specific to child stimuli but occurred in response to both adult and child stimuli and might indicate that mothers and non-mothers employ different strategies to infer action intentions from affective faces. Whether these general differences in affective ToM between mothers and non-mothers are due to biological or experience-related changes should be subject of further investigation.
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