Neural Responses to Infant Emotions and Emotional Self-Awareness in Mothers and Fathers during Pregnancy

Cristina Trentini, Marco Pagani, Marco Lauriola and Renata Tambelli
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Cristina Trentini: Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, “Sapienza” University of Rome, 00185 Rome, Italy
Marco Pagani: Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, CNR, 00185 Rome, Italy
Marco Lauriola: Department of Social and Developmental Psychology, “Sapienza” University of Rome, 00185 Rome, Italy
Renata Tambelli: Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, “Sapienza” University of Rome, 00185 Rome, Italy

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 9, 1-21

Abstract: Neuroscientific research has largely investigated the neurobiological correlates of maternal and (to a much lesser extent) paternal responsiveness in the post-partum period. In contrast, much less is known about the neural processing of infant emotions during pregnancy. Twenty mothers and 19 fathers were recruited independently during the third trimester of pregnancy. High-density electroencephalography (hdEEG) was recorded while expectant parents passively viewed images representing distressed, ambiguous, happy, and neutral faces of unknown infants. Correlational analyses were performed to detect a link between neural responses to infant facial expressions and emotional self-awareness. In response to infant emotions, mothers and fathers showed similar cerebral activity in regions involved in high-order socio-affective processes. Mothers and fathers also showed different brain activity in premotor regions implicated in high-order motor control, in occipital regions involved in visuo-spatial information processing and visual mental imagery, as well as in inferior parietal regions involved in attention allocation. Low emotional self-awareness negatively correlated with activity in parietal regions subserving empathy in mothers, while it positively correlated with activity in temporal and occipital areas implicated in mentalizing and visual mental imagery in fathers. This study may enlarge knowledge on the neural response to infant emotions during pregnancy.

Keywords: pregnancy; mothers and fathers; emotional self-awareness; infant emotions; hdEEG (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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