Department of Psychology, University of Denver, Denver, CO 80208-3500, USA.
Department of Biomedical Sciences and Imaging, Biomedical Imaging Research Institute, Cedars Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA 90048, USA.
Cereb Cortex. 2022 Jul 21;32(15):3175-3186. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhab408.
Mother and infant neural and behavioral synchrony is important for infant development during the first years of life. Recent studies also suggest that neural risk markers associated with parental psychopathology may be transmitted across generations before symptoms emerge in offspring. There is limited understanding of how early similarity in brain functioning between 2 generations emerges. In the current study, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined the functional connectivity (FC) similarity between mothers and newborns during the first 3 months after the infant's birth. We found that FC similarity between mothers and infants increased as infant age increased. Furthermore, we examined whether maternal factors such as maternal socioeconomic status and prenatal maternal depressive symptoms may influence individual differences in FC similarity. For the whole-brain level, lower maternal education levels were associated with greater FC similarity. In previous literature, lower maternal education levels were associated with suboptimal cognitive and socioemotional development. Greater FC similarity may reflect that the infants develop their FC similarity prematurely, which may suboptimally influence their developmental outcomes in later ages.
母婴神经和行为同步对婴儿生命最初几年的发育很重要。最近的研究还表明，与父母精神病理学相关的神经风险标志物可能在后代出现症状之前就通过代际传递。目前对于两代人之间大脑功能早期相似性的出现方式还知之甚少。在当前的研究中，我们使用功能磁共振成像，研究了婴儿出生后前 3 个月母亲和新生儿之间的功能连接（FC）相似性。我们发现，随着婴儿年龄的增长，母亲和婴儿之间的 FC 相似性增加。此外，我们还研究了母亲的社会经济地位和产前抑郁等因素是否会影响 FC 相似性的个体差异。在全脑水平上，母亲的受教育程度越低，FC 相似性越大。在之前的文献中，母亲的受教育程度较低与认知和社会情感发展不理想有关。更大的 FC 相似性可能反映出婴儿过早地发展了他们的 FC 相似性，这可能会对他们以后的发育结果产生不利影响。
