Raising a child can be one of the most rewarding tasks that a person can experience in their life. However, as many people know, it can also be one of the most difficult. There are many signs that indicate successful parenting, such as the child showing secure attachment to their parents and/or caregivers, as well as being able to function well in society, appropriately manage their emotions, and demonstrate competence in both cognition/thinking and language use. While there are many different factors that may contribute to supporting these different aspects of an infant’s life, one major factor that has been established in the scientific community is maternal sensitivity.
Maternal sensitivity refers to the degree to which a mother responds to her infant’s signals in an appropriate and timely manner. In other words, if a mother fails to pick up on cues that the infant is sending her way, or responds in a way that is not suitable for the situation at hand, the mother is said to have low maternal sensitivity. Studies have shown that this can lead to negative social, emotional, and cognitive development for the infant. Therefore, researchers have become very interested in trying to figure out how to increase maternal sensitivity. One way to do this is to study how the neurobiology underlying maternal care changes after interventions.
Studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have discovered that certain areas of mothers’ brains respond to either viewing their own infants face, or hearing them cry. These brain responses have been found in several areas, such as areas involved in motivation and reward (e.g. anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex), memories (e.g. hippocampus), and areas involved in the release of a chemical messenger called oxytocin (e.g. hypothalamus). It is possible that you may have heard of oxytocin before, as it is popularly referred to as the ‘love hormone’, the ‘hug hormone’, and the ‘cuddle hormone’. Basically, oxytocin has a large influence on social behaviour. Knowing the patterns of brain and oxytocin activation that are related to sensitive parenting may help identify biomarkers of maternal sensitivity (meaning that researchers will have a legitimate way to measure whether mothers have either low or high maternal sensitivity). This could be extremely helpful, as it would allow expensive interventions to be targeted specifically towards mothers with low maternal sensitivity.
Therefore, researchers Elmadih, Wan, Downey, Elliott, Swain, and Abel (2016) tried to make a map of distinct neurobiological profiles of “high” and “low” sensitivity mothers. They did this so they could test whether mothers with high sensitivity would show more activation in areas that regulate motivation, caring, emotions, and cognitions (i.e. the hippocampus, hypothalamus, cingulate cortex, and superior temporal gyrus) compared to mothers with low sensitivity, while viewing videos of their infant. They found that this was the case, especially with the superior temporal gyrus, which is activated during facial emotion perception. This makes logical sense – how could a mother be a sensitive parent and respond appropriately if they cannot recognize their infant’s emotions?
Researchers also examined if, for high sensitivity mothers, brain activations would have a positive relationship with their oxytocin levels after playing with their infants. Interestingly, they did not find this to be the case, but instead found that activation in these areas had a negative relationship with levels of oxytocin (i.e. as activation levels went up, oxytocin levels went down). Meanwhile, mothers with low sensitivity seemed to have higher levels of oxytocin. While this was unexpected, researchers realized that oxytocin is sometimes released when there is stress surrounding the need to enhance or strengthen a relationship. Therefore, it is likely that high sensitivity mothers do not experience this with their infant, as they are already pretty good at accurately understanding and responding to their infant’s needs. Low sensitivity mothers, on the other hand, do not possess these skills and therefore their bodies may release oxytocin as a response.
References
Elmadih, A., Wan, M. W., Downey, D., Elliott, R., Swain, J. E., & Abel, K. M. (2016). Natural variation in maternal sensitivity is reflected in maternal brain responses to infant stimuli. Behavioral Neuroscience, 130(5), 500-510.
