Mothers' neural activation in response to pictures of their children and other children
Section snippets
Subjects
The study was approved by the National Institute of Mental Health Institutional Review Board, and all subjects gave written informed consent before participating. Subjects were recruited by advertisement and were paid for their participation. Participants were right-handed women aged 20–40 years whose firstborn (nonadopted) child was 5–12 years old. Handedness was assessed by self-report, and vision 20/30 or better was ascertained by use of a Snellen eye chart. All subjects were without
Results
Ten women who met inclusion criteria were scanned. Data from three subjects were excluded from further analysis. In one, there was significant imaging artifact. In two others, there were no response differences for faces, averaging over familiar and unfamiliar faces, compared with scrambled images, calling into question the compliance of the subjects with the task. This contrast (i.e., faces vs. scrambled images) is orthogonal to the contrasts of interest for our study of the effect of
Discussion
The results of this study show that simple viewing of one's child's face evoked a unique pattern of neural responses in mothers that may reflect how the maternal relationship differs from other social attachments. This pattern was revealed by comparing neural activation while viewing one's own child to activation while viewing another very familiar child with whom the mother does not have a biological relationship (i.e., her child's friend). Viewing one's own child evoked stronger responses in
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