Neural correlates of emotion regulation in parenting

Parenting • Becoming a parent represents an important developmental period in adulthood marked by neurobiological and psychological changes. These changes are important to understand with maternal behavior significantly contributing to the child’s physical and emotional development1. • Prior neuroimaging research has established distinct neural correlates of parenting in response to exposure to infant stimuli (vocalizations and photographs) that include both prefrontal and subcortical emotion and reward regions2. These findings suggest cortical re-organization in parents that may be important in facilitating parenting behavior and our focus here is emotion regulation. One of the challenges facing new mothers is the necessity to regulate both her own emotional states as well as the emotional states of her child, especially when her child is in distress. • Our research question: Do the neural correlates of emotion regulation differ between mothers and non-mothers in response to infant cues of affect?