Towards a Biological Understanding of Parenting Across Contexts
Date
2021
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Abstract
Parenting is not only essential for species survival but also has long been apredictor of child success across a number of social, cognitive, and psychological
domains. Parenting—like all behaviors—is in part biologically driven. Knowledge of
such biological underpinnings sheds light into how parenting operates—providing
important new directions for interventions and basic science alike. With the advent of
neuroimaging, questions of biological bases for parenting have been answered with
greater specificity than ever before. To date dozens of studies have been published on the
neural correlates of parent responses to children, though a comprehensive quantitative
review of this literature is lacking. Thus, Study 1 of this dissertation was a meta-analysis,
using activation likelihood estimation, of all existing neuroimaging studies (N=59) of
parent responses to children to identify possible neural networks involved in caregiving.
Further, this study examined variations in the neural networks as a function of parent
gender, child age, child negative as compared to other emotion, and own child stimuli as
compared to another child’s stimuli. Results revealed coordination of emotional arousal,
reward, social cognitive, and sensorimotor brain networks across studies. However, one
of the most important gaps identified in this study was the absence of neuroimaging
studies with parents from diverse backgrounds or contexts with heightened environmental
stressors (e.g. poverty, discrimination). Therefore, building on this foundation, Study 2 of
this dissertation was a fMRI pilot study of 16 first generation Latinx mothers of a 10-14
year old adolescent. This study examined the neural correlates of parenting in a group
that has not been studied previously and a group that is disproportionately affected by
threat of deportation/immigration stress, poverty, and limited access to mental health care
but a group that also has a variety of unique cultural strengths. Mothers were scanned
using fMRI while looking at videos of their own child in a parent-child discussion as
compared to another age, gender, and ethnically matched child. Results from this study
revealed engagement of similar networks to the overall meta-analysis (social cognition,
sensorimotor) with a particular emphasis on empathy related networks as underpinning
parent responses to their child in Latinx mothers and parent responses when their child
had heightened psychological symptoms (externalizing symptoms). Networks involved in
fear and pain responses were found to underpin harsh/inconsistent parenting. Networks
involved in motor coordination, which may represent a certain physical hypervigilance or
“on edge feeling”, were related to both heightened immigration stress and heightened
harsh/inconsistent parenting, suggesting the brain as a possible pathway from unique
stressors to parenting behaviors. Implications of such findings and directions for future
research are discussed.