Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Nagasaki University, 1-12-4 Sakamoto-cho, Nagasaki City, Nagasaki 852-8523, Japan.
Brain Cogn. 2012 Nov;80(2):266-76. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2012.07.009. Epub 2012 Aug 30.
An attachment bond between a mother and her child is one of the most intimate human relationships. It is important for a mother to be sensitive to her child's gaze direction because exchanging gaze information plays a vital role in their relationship. Furthermore, recent studies have revealed differential neural activation patterns in mothers when presented the faces of their own children or the unfamiliar child of other people. Based on these findings, in the present study, we investigated whether mothers show differential neural responses to gaze information of their own child compared to that of an unfamiliar child. To this end, event-related-potentials elicited by the faces of one's own or an unfamiliar child with straight or averted gaze directions were measured using an oddball-paradigm. The results showed that peak amplitudes of the N170 component were enlarged by viewing the straight gazes compared to the averted gazes of one's own child, but not of an unfamiliar child. When the gaze was directed straight, the P3 amplitude elicited by one's own child's face is smaller than that elicited by an unfamiliar child's face. P3s elicited in viewing one's own child's face with averted gaze and in viewing an unfamiliar child's face with straight gaze were positively correlated with state-anxiety. These results bolster the hypothesis that processing the gaze information of one's own child elicits differential neural activation compared to the gaze information of an other person's unfamiliar child at both perceptual and evaluative stages of face processing.
母婴依恋关系是人类最亲密的关系之一。母亲对孩子的注视方向保持敏感非常重要，因为眼神交流信息在母婴关系中起着至关重要的作用。此外，最近的研究揭示了母亲在呈现自己孩子或其他人不熟悉的孩子的面孔时，大脑神经激活模式存在差异。基于这些发现，本研究旨在探讨母亲对自己孩子和不熟悉孩子的注视信息是否表现出不同的神经反应。为此，我们使用了一种偶发范式，测量了母亲观看自己孩子或不熟悉孩子正视或斜视时的面孔诱发的事件相关电位。结果表明，与观看自己孩子的斜视相比，观看自己孩子的正视会使 N170 成分的峰值幅度增大，但对不熟悉孩子的注视方向则没有这种影响。当注视方向为正，观看自己孩子的面孔所诱发的 P3 波幅比观看不熟悉孩子的面孔所诱发的 P3 波幅小。观看自己孩子斜视时和观看不熟悉孩子正视时所诱发的 P3 波幅与状态焦虑呈正相关。这些结果支持了这样一种假设，即在感知和评价阶段，处理自己孩子的注视信息会引起与处理他人不熟悉孩子的注视信息不同的神经激活。
