Publication Date

9-30-2019

Document Type

Article

Organizational Units

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Psychology

Keywords

Childhood maltreatment, Mother, Infant, Amygdala, Face

Abstract

Face processing in mothers is linked to mother–infant social communication, which is critical for parenting and in turn for child development. Neuroimaging studies of child maltreatment-exposed (CME) mothers are sparse compared to studies of mothers with postpartum depression, which have suggested blunted amygdala reactivity to infant stimuli. We expected to see a similar pattern in CME mothers. Based on broader studies in trauma-exposed populations, we anticipated increased amygdala reactivity to negative adult face stimuli in a comparison task in CME mothers given heightened evaluation of potential threat. We examined Neuroimaging studies of mothers with childhood maltreatment exposure (CME) (18–37 years old), who performed infant (N = 45) and/or adult (N = 46) face processing tasks. CME mothers exhibited blunted bilateral amygdala reactivity to infant faces. There was no between-group difference in amygdala reactivity to adult faces. In infant and adult face processing tasks regardless of CME, superior temporal gyrus activation was increased for negative-valence stimuli. Our preliminary findings suggest that childhood maltreatment alters maternal processing of infant social cues, a critical skill impacting infant socioemotional development.

Copyright Date

11-4-2019

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Rights Holder

Aviva K. Olsavsky, Joel Stoddard, Andrew Erhart, Rebekah Tribble, and Pilyoung Kim

Provenance

Received from CHORUS

File Format

application/pdf

Language

English (eng)

Extent

12 pgs

File Size

3.7 MB

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the authors. User is responsible for all copyright compliance. This article was originally published as:

Olsavsky, A. K., Stoddard, J., Erhart, A., Tribble, R., & Kim, P. (2019). Neural processing of infant and adult face emotion and maternal exposure to childhood maltreatment. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 14(9), 997-1008. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsz069

Publication Title

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

Volume

14

Issue

9

First Page

997

Last Page

1008

ISSN

1749-5024

PubMed ID

31680141



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