Frontiers in Psychology (Oct 2015)
Parental Brain: Cerebral Areas Activated By Infant Cries And Faces. A Comparison Between Different Populations Of Parents And Not
Abstract
Literature about parenting traditionally focused on caring behaviors and parental representations. Nowadays, an innovative line of researches, interested in evaluating the neural areas and hormones implicated in the nurturing and caregiving responses, has developed. The only way to permit a newborn to survive and grow up is to respond to his needs and in order to succeed it is necessary, first of all, that the adults around him understand what his needs are. That’s why adults’ capacity of taking care of infants cannot disregard from some biological mechanisms, which allow them to be more responsive to the progeny and to infants in general. Many researches have proved that exist specific neural basis activating in response to infant evolutionary stimuli, such as infant cries and infant emotional facial expression. There is a sort of innate predisposition in human adults to respond to infants’ signals, in order to satisfy their need and allow them to survive and become young adults capable of taking care of themselves. This article focuses on those researches that have investigated, in the last decade, which are the neural circuits underlying parental behavioral responses.Moreover, the paper compares the results of those studies that investigated the neural responses to infant stimuli under different conditions: familiar versus unknown children, parents versus non-parents and normative versus clinical samples (depression, addiction, adolescence and PTSD).
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