Loading...
In maternal attachment research, impaired mother–child bonding has been correlated with the child's later psychopathology (JW Psychiatry Apr 9 2012). Less is known about father–infant bonding or about brain synchrony between parents when observing their offspring.
To study neurocircuitry and hormonal responses to infant cues in 15 physically and mentally healthy parent couples, researchers made home videos of their 4- to 6-month-old infants playing alone or with the parents. Parents then underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while watching these videos and similar ones of stranger children.
When observing their own infants, parents showed synchrony in multiple social-cognitive regions on fMRI, including associative visual cor…