Center for Developmental Social Neuroscience, Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Herzliya 4610101, Israel.
Gonda Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan 5290002, Israel.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2021 Apr 6;118(14). doi: 10.1073/pnas.2012900118.
Mammalian young are born with immature brain and rely on the mother's body and caregiving behavior for maturation of neurobiological systems that sustain adult sociality. While research in animal models indicated the long-term effects of maternal contact and caregiving on the adult brain, little is known about the effects of maternal-newborn contact and parenting behavior on social brain functioning in human adults. We followed human neonates, including premature infants who initially lacked or received maternal-newborn skin-to-skin contact and full-term controls, from birth to adulthood, repeatedly observing mother-child social synchrony at key developmental nodes. We tested the brain basis of affect-specific empathy in young adulthood and utilized multivariate techniques to distinguish brain regions sensitive to others' distinct emotions from those globally activated by the empathy task. The amygdala, insula, temporal pole (TP), and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) showed high sensitivity to others' distinct emotions. Provision of maternal-newborn contact enhanced social synchrony across development from infancy and up until adulthood. The experience of synchrony, in turn, predicted the brain's sensitivity to emotion-specific empathy in the amygdala and insula, core structures of the social brain. Social synchrony linked with greater empathic understanding in adolescence, which was longitudinally associated with higher neural sensitivity to emotion-specific empathy in TP and VMPFC. Findings demonstrate the centrality of synchronous caregiving, by which infants practice the detection and sharing of others' affective states, for tuning the human social brain, particularly in regions implicated in salience detection, interoception, and mentalization that underpin affect sharing and human attachment.
哺乳动物的幼崽出生时大脑尚未发育成熟，它们依靠母亲的身体和照顾行为来促进维持成年社会性的神经生物学系统的成熟。虽然动物模型的研究表明了母亲接触和照顾对成年大脑的长期影响，但对于母婴接触和父母行为对人类成年人大脑社交功能的影响知之甚少。我们跟踪了人类新生儿，包括最初缺乏或接受母婴皮肤接触的早产儿和足月对照组，从出生到成年，在关键的发育节点上反复观察母子社会同步性。我们在年轻成年人中测试了特定情感同理心的大脑基础，并利用多元技术来区分对他人不同情绪敏感的大脑区域和同理心任务全局激活的大脑区域。杏仁核、脑岛、颞极（TP）和腹内侧前额叶皮层（VMPFC）对他人的不同情绪表现出高度的敏感性。母婴接触的提供增强了从婴儿期到成年期的社会同步性。反过来，这种同步性的体验又预测了杏仁核和脑岛中特定情感同理心的大脑敏感性，这些区域是社交大脑的核心结构。社交同步性与青少年时期更强的同理心理解能力相关，而这种理解能力又与 TP 和 VMPFC 中对特定情感同理心的神经敏感性相关，这种敏感性与社会大脑有关，特别是在与突显检测、内感受和心理化相关的区域，这些区域是情感共享和人类依恋的基础。研究结果表明，同步照顾的核心作用，即婴儿练习感知和分享他人的情感状态，对于调节人类社交大脑非常重要，特别是在与突显检测、内感受和心理化相关的区域，这些区域是情感共享和人类依恋的基础。
