Review
The adaptive human parental brain: implications for children's social development

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2015.04.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The parental caregiving network integrates core limbic with cortical sociocognitive networks.

  • Human parental brain is characterized by plasticity, uniquely expressed in mothers and fathers.

  • Nodes of the parental brain are related to mothers’ and fathers’ hormones and interactive behavior.

  • Links of parents’ brain with oxytocin and synchrony support long-term effect on infant social growth.

Although interest in the neurobiology of parent–infant bonding is a century old, neuroimaging of the human parental brain is recent. After summarizing current comparative research into the neurobiology of parenting, here I chart a global ‘parental caregiving’ network that integrates conserved structures supporting mammalian caregiving with later-evolving networks and implicates parenting in the evolution of higher order social functions aimed at maximizing infant survival. The response of the parental brain to bonding-related behavior and hormones, particularly oxytocin, and increased postpartum brain plasticity demonstrate adaptation to infant stimuli, childrearing experiences, and cultural contexts. Mechanisms of biobehavioral synchrony by which the parental brain shapes, and is shaped by, infant physiology and behavior emphasize the brain basis of caregiving for the cross-generation transmission of human sociality.

Section snippets

The brain basis of human parenting: an emerging field of inquiry

Parenting is the process most critically implicated in the survival and continuity of life on Earth. It is also the only social behavior observed across species and taxa, appearing in multiple forms from limited to extended, and provided to offspring variously by mothers only, mothers and fathers, father alone in some non-mammalian species, or collaboratively by parents and conspecifics. Thus, parenting likely contains both more evolutionarily conserved components than all other social

The parental brain: animal models

Animal studies have mainly tested the parental brain in female rodents; therefore, less is known about fathers, nonhuman primates, or species forming an exclusive maternal–infant bond [6]. This research has described the critical role of the medial pre-optic area (MPOA) in the hypothalamus for initiation of maternal behavior. Primed by pregnancy hormones, particularly oxytocin and prolactin, the MPOA acts, via its projections to the mesolimbic dopamine circuits [especially the nucleus accumbens

Evolutionary conserved components

Several conserved aspects of parental care are observed in humans. Both the amygdala and reward circuitry are key components of the human parental brain and support parental vigilance and/or anxiety for infant safety as well as reward from the attachment relation [33]. Similarly, studies have pointed to increased brain plasticity in humans, which provides an opportunity for reorganization of the parent's brain [34]. Finally, the modulatory role of oxytocin in the subcortical network that

The maternal and the paternal brain: plasticity, connectivity, and correlates

Active paternal care is observed in only 3–5% of mammalian species, and father care in these species is facultative, that is, enhances infant survival in the context of mothering [110]. Thus, further research is needed to describe not only mechanisms that shape the paternal brain, but also those that enable mothers and fathers to coordinate effort to jointly raise their young and those that describe the unique effects of father care on infant thriving. Research in biparental rodents

Parent's brain and child's social development: processes of biobehavioral synchrony

The mammalian parental brain evolved in the context of mutual influences between maternal and infant physiology through development of the placenta as a co-regulated core of maternal–fetal effects and the subsequent emergence of thalamocortical networks shaped by pregnancy hormones [116]. Mutual postbirth influences occur via processes of biobehavioral synchrony: maternal regulation of the infant's immature systems via specific regulatory elements embedded in the mother's body (body-heat,

The parental brain and human sociality: implications for theory and research

How can research on the parental brain expand our understanding of human sociality? First, because all mammals parent their children, parenting is the only aspect of social neuroscience that can be studied across the evolutionary ladder utilizing a comparative framework that applies direct mechanistic hypotheses based on animal research to the human social brain. Such comparisons are not easily accomplished in other human-specific functions, such as empathy or emotion regulation. Second, the

Acknowledgments

Supported by grants from the Israel-German Foundation (1114-101.4/2010), and by the I-CORE Program of the Planning and Budgeting Committee and The Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 51/11). We thank Maayan Harel (http://www.maayanillustration.com/), for the design and illustration of the figures in this paper.

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