Fig. 7.

Parental affective neuroscience and response to infant stress. Parent-child relationships – like any relationship – are influenced by outside factors, such as previous childhood poverty experienced by the parents. A) Response to a distressed child shows sex-specific brain activation in parents who had experienced childhood poverty. Specifically, women show increased activity in the posterior insula, striatum, calcarine sulcus, hippocampus, and fusiform gyrus, whereas men show decreased activation in these regions in response to infant cries. These neurobiological changes were associated with self-reported feelings of annoyance and reduced desire to approach infants in both men and women. B) Intervention, such as training programs for promoting maternal empathy and learning stress reduction skills (called “Mom Power”), was shown to increase activity in typical child-focused, social brain areas like the precuneus, subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, and amygdala-temporal pole functional connectivity. This training and altered brain activity was accompanied by decreased annoyance and stress felt by mothers.