Neuroendocrine mechanisms for parental sensitivity: overview, recent advances and future directions

Abstract

Early parent-infant relationships play important roles in infants' development. New parents adapt to the developing relationship with their infants to coordinate parenting behaviors in the milieu of infant needs, hormones, moods, and stress. This review highlights research from the past two years, using non-invasive brain-imaging techniques and naturalistic tasks in mothers and fathers in relation to psychological, and endocrine measures. Recent work also connects parental brain physiology with parental sensitive behavior, parent/child outcomes and parent psychotherapy. Understanding neurobiological mechanisms underlying parenting thoughts, behaviors and moods (see Figure 1) will help identify mental health risks and contribute to parental mental health interventions and resilience.

Figure 1

Parental brain – Early life factors, such as experience of parental warmth and previous mental health affect plastic brain circuits that determine maternal affective regulation and caregiving outcomes for mothers, fathers and their children. Adaptable circuits, some of which are overlapping, include those for salience/alarm/reward processing (amygdala. insula, ventral striatum), emotion regulation (anterior cingulate) and executive function/empathy (prefrontal cortices and precuneus) – with input from hormones such as OT and cortisol (adapted from Ref. [9]).