Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA.
Department of Psychology, Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2020 Jun 23;15(4):437-446. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsaa051.
Expectant parents' responses to infant cry may indicate future risk and resiliency in the parent-child relationship. Most studies of parental reactivity to infant cry have focused on mothers, and few studies have focused on expectant fathers, although fathers make important contributions to parenting. Additionally, although different responses to infant cry (behavioral, psychological and neural) are hypothesized to track together, few studies have analyzed them concurrently. The current investigation aimed to address these gaps by characterizing multimodal responses to infant cry within expectant fathers and testing whether prenatal testosterone moderates these responses. Expectant fathers responded to infant cry vs frequency-matched white noise with increased activation in bilateral areas of the temporal lobe involved in processing speech sounds and social and emotional stimuli. Handgrip force, which has been used to measure parents' reactivity to cry sounds in previous studies, did not differentiate cry from white noise within this sample. Expectant fathers with higher prenatal testosterone showed greater activation in the supramarginal gyrus, left occipital lobe and precuneus cortex to cry sounds. Expectant fathers appear to interpret and process infant cry as a meaningful speech sound and social cue, and testosterone may play a role in expectant fathers' response to infant cry.
期待为人父母者对婴儿哭声的反应可能预示着未来亲子关系中的风险和适应能力。大多数研究父母对婴儿哭声的反应都集中在母亲身上，很少有研究关注预期父亲，尽管父亲对育儿做出了重要贡献。此外，尽管对婴儿哭声的不同反应（行为、心理和神经）被假设为相互关联，但很少有研究同时对它们进行分析。当前的研究旨在通过描述预期父亲对婴儿哭声的多模态反应来解决这些差距，并测试产前睾酮是否调节这些反应。预期父亲对婴儿哭声的反应比对频率匹配的白噪声的反应增加了双侧颞叶区域的激活，这些区域参与处理语音声音和社会及情感刺激。在以前的研究中，手力被用来测量父母对哭声的反应，在这个样本中，手力并不能区分哭声和白噪声。产前睾酮水平较高的预期父亲在听到哭声时，大脑额上回、左侧枕叶和楔前叶的活跃度更高。预期父亲似乎将婴儿哭声解释为有意义的语音和社会线索，而睾酮可能在预期父亲对婴儿哭声的反应中发挥作用。
