Mother brain is wired for social moments
- Ortal Shimon-Raz
- Roy Salomon
- Miki Bloch
- Gabi Aisenberg Romano
- Yaara Yeshurun
- Adi Ulmer-Yaniv
- Orna Zagoory-Sharon
- Ruth Feldman
- IDC Herzliya, Israel
- Bar Ilan University, Israel
- Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, Israel
- Tel Aviv University, Israel
Abstract
Reorganization of the maternal brain upon childbirth triggers species-typical maternal social behavior. These brief social moments carry profound effects on the infant's brain and likely have distinct signature in the maternal brain. Utilizing a double-blind, within-subject oxytocin/placebo administration crossover design, mothers' brain was imaged twice using fMRI while observing three naturalistic maternal-infant contexts in the home ecology; 'unavailable', 'unresponsive', and 'social', when mothers engaged in synchronous peek-a-boo play. The social condition elicited greater neural response across the human caregiving network, including amygdala, VTA, hippocampus, insula, ACC, and temporal cortex. Oxytocin impacted neural response primarily to the social condition and attenuated differences between social and non-social stimuli. Greater temporal consistency emerged in the 'social' condition across the two imaging sessions, particularly in insula, amygdala, and TP. Findings describe how mother's brain varies by caregiving experiences and gives salience to moments of social synchrony that support infant social development and brain maturation.
Data availability
We shared raw, subject by subject, anonymized brain data (fMRI); group level data (e.g. unthresholded group maps on MNI template) and raw subject by subject data from the ROI analysis (csv and JASP files). These files are uploaded to our OSF account (https://osf.io/mszqj/?view_only=0daf10c02c984ead8929452edf44e550). We believe that these measures will allow full transparency of the data.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Simms/Mann Foundation
- Ruth Feldman
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: The study was approved by the Bar-Ilan University's IRB and by the Helsinki committee of the Sourasky medical center, Tel Aviv (Ethical approval no. 0161-14-TLV). All participants signed an informed consent.
Copyright
© 2021, Shimon-Raz et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Mother brain is wired for social moments
eLife 10:e59436.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.59436
