Journal
SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 7, Issue 5, Pages 525-536Publisher
ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/17470919.2012.672457
Keywords
Infant face; Parenting; Depression; ERP/EEG, N170
Categories
Funding
- Anna Freud Centre (UK)
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Infant faces are highly salient social stimuli that appear to elicit intuitive parenting behaviors in healthy adult women. Behavioral and observational studies indicate that this effect may be modulated by experiences of reproduction, caregiving, and psychiatric symptomatology that affect normative attention and reward processing of infant cues. However, relatively little is known about the neural correlates of these effects. Using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, this study investigated the impact of parental status (mother, non-mother) and depression symptoms on early visual processing of infant faces in a community sample of adult women. Specifically, the P1 and N170 ERP components elicited in response to infant face stimuli were examined. While characteristics of the N170 were not modulated by parental status, a statistically significant positive correlation was observed between depression symptom severity and N170 amplitude. This relationship was not observed for the P1. These results suggest that depression symptoms may modulate early neurophysiological responsiveness to infant cues, even at sub-clinical levels.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available