Probing the association between maternal anxious attachment style and mother-child brain-to-brain coupling during passive co-viewing of visual stimuli

ABSTRACT

Brain-to-brain coupling during co-viewing of video stimuli reflects similar intersubjective mentalisation processes. During an everyday joint activity of watching video stimuli (television shows) with her child, an anxiously attached mother’s preoccupation with her child is likely to distract her from understanding the mental state of characters in the show. To test the hypothesis that reduced coupling in the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) would be observed with increasing maternal attachment anxiety (MAA), we profiled mothers’ MAA using the Attachment Style Questionnaire and used functional Near-infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to assess PFC coupling in 31 mother-child dyads while they watched three 1-min animation videos together. Reduced coupling was observed with increasing MAA in the medial right PFC cluster which is implicated in mentalisation processes. This result did not survive control analyses and should be taken as preliminary. Reduced coupling between anxiously-attached mothers and their children during co-viewing could undermine quality of shared experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Attachment
• mother-child
• brain coupling
• parenting
• NIRS
• prefrontal cortex

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the NAP Start-up Grant M4081597 (G.E.) from Nanyang Technological University Singapore as well as the Ministry of Education Tier-1 Grant RG55/18 (NS) 2018-T1-001-172 (G.E.), the Intramural Research Program of the NIH/NICHD, USA (M.H.B.), and an International Research Fellowship at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), London, UK (M.H.B.), funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 695300-HKADeC-ERC-2015-AdG) (M.H.B.). The founder agencies had no role in the conceptualization, design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).