Yin Lijun, Fan Mingxia, Lin Lijia, Sun Delin, Wang Zhaoxin
Shanghai Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics (Ministry of Education), Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.
Department of Psychology, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2017 Nov 14;11:551. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2017.00551. eCollection 2017.
Consistent attention and proper processing of infant faces by adults are essential for infant survival. Previous behavioral studies showed gender differences in processing infant cues (e.g., crying, laughing or facial attractiveness) and more importantly, the efforts invested in nurturing offspring. The underlying neural mechanisms of processing unknown infant faces provide hints for understanding behavioral differences. This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study recruited 32 unmarried adult (16 females and 16 males) participants to view unfamiliar infant faces and rate the attractiveness. Adult faces were also included. Behaviorally, despite that females and males showed no differences in attractiveness ratings of infant faces, a positive correlation was found between female's (but not male's) subjective liking for infants and attractiveness ratings of the infant faces. Functionally, brain activations to infant faces were modulated by attractiveness differently in males and females. Specifically, in female participants, activities in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and striatum/Nucleus Accumbens (NAcc) were positively modulated by infant facial attractiveness, and the modulation coefficients of these two regions were positively correlated. In male participants, infant facial attractiveness negatively modulated the activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC). Our findings reveal that different neural mechanisms are involved in the processing of infant faces, which might lead to observed behavioral differences between males and females towards the baby.
成年人持续关注并妥善处理婴儿的面部信息对婴儿的生存至关重要。先前的行为学研究表明，在处理婴儿线索（如哭泣、欢笑或面部吸引力）方面存在性别差异，更重要的是，在养育后代方面投入的精力也存在性别差异。处理陌生婴儿面孔的潜在神经机制为理解行为差异提供了线索。这项功能磁共振成像（fMRI）研究招募了32名未婚成年人（16名女性和16名男性）参与者，让他们观看不熟悉的婴儿面孔并对吸引力进行评分。研究中也纳入了成人面孔。在行为方面，尽管男性和女性在婴儿面孔吸引力评分上没有差异，但发现女性（而非男性）对婴儿的主观喜爱程度与婴儿面孔吸引力评分之间存在正相关。在功能方面，男性和女性对婴儿面孔的大脑激活受到吸引力的调节方式不同。具体而言，在女性参与者中，腹内侧前额叶皮层（vmPFC）和纹状体/伏隔核（NAcc）的活动受到婴儿面部吸引力的正向调节，并且这两个区域的调节系数呈正相关。在男性参与者中，婴儿面部吸引力对背内侧前额叶皮层（dmPFC）的活动产生负向调节。我们的研究结果表明，处理婴儿面孔涉及不同的神经机制，这可能导致观察到的男性和女性对婴儿的行为差异。
