Maternal perception of children’s fear: A fMRI study in mothers of preschool children

ABSTRACT

A secure attachment relationship is facilitated by a mother´s ability to perceive her child´s emotions, especially her child´s fear. Prior studies showed that maternal perception of an own child activated a neural network including amygdala, insula and nucleus accumbens (NAcc). Results for different emotions were inconsistent and there are no reports on children´s fear. The goal of this study was to investigate neural responses of 17 mothers to photos of their own and an unknown preschool child with happy and fearful expressions by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Whole brain analyses showed that a fearful (vs. happy) own child elicited larger activity in the visual cortex. Region of interest (ROI) analyses (amygdala, insula, NAcc) revealed stronger responses to a happy (vs. fearful) unknown child, but equally strong responses to one´s own child´s expressions. Moreover, an own (vs. unknown) fearful child elicited larger activity in the insula and NAcc. This suggests that mothers allocated more visual attention towards their own child´s fear, but showed consistent emotional involvement with their own child across expressions. Mothers might respond with stronger empathy and approach motivation towards an own (vs. unknown) fearful child, in line with a key role of fear in the attachment relationship.

KEYWORDS:

• Fmri
• attachment
• fearful faces
• preschool children

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

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Notes

¹ Retranslated by the first author.

² The depicted own child is the son of one study subject whose parents declared their written consent with the publication of the photo. The unknown child was cut out from a free creative commons picture taken from pixabay.com.