Department of Psychological, Health and Territorial Sciences, University "G. d'Annunzio" of Chieti-Pescara, Via dei Vestini, 31, I-66100, Chieti, Italy.
Sci Rep. 2019 Apr 16;9(1):6141. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-42539-6.
Women usually cradle their infants to the left of their body midline. Research showed that the left cradling could be altered by affective symptoms in mothers, so that right cradling might be associated with a reduced ability to become emotionally involved with the infant. In this study, we assessed cradling-side bias (using family photo inspection and an imagination task), as well as depression and empathy, in 50 healthy mothers of 0-3 years old children. The main finding was that the strength of the left-cradling bias was negatively related with participants' depression scores and slightly positively related with their empathy scores. Our results thus provide further evidence that cradling-side preferences can represent an evolutionary proxy of mother's affective state, influencing the early development of the infant social brain and behaviour.
女性通常会将婴儿抱在身体中线的左侧。研究表明，母亲的情绪症状可能会改变左侧抱婴的习惯，使得右侧抱婴可能与降低与婴儿产生情感联系的能力有关。在这项研究中，我们评估了 50 名 0-3 岁儿童健康母亲的抱婴侧偏见（使用家庭照片检查和想象任务）、抑郁和同理心。主要发现是，左抱婴的偏好在强度上与参与者的抑郁评分呈负相关，与同理心评分呈轻微正相关。因此，我们的研究结果进一步证明，抱婴侧偏好可以代表母亲情绪状态的进化代理，影响婴儿社会大脑和行为的早期发展。
