Although a great deal is known about physiological responding to stress in nonhuman animals, and also about individual differences in behavioral attunement in humans, physiological attunement between human mothers and their children has never been studied. The current study examined attunement in adrenocortical response between mother and child in the context of the child's exposure to a novel ...

This study examined the role of maternal cognitive sets regarding infant gender on maternal response; participants were 69 mothers, each with a 6-month-old infant. Signal detection methodology was used to assess maternal sensory sensitivity and response bias to subtle changes in positive and negative infant facial expressions as a function of maternal self-efficacy, operationalized by low, mode...

This study addresses a gap in the attachment literature by investigating maternal neural response to cry related to infant attachment classifications and behaviors. Twenty-two primiparous mothers and their 18-month old infants completed the Strange Situation (SS) procedure to elicit attachment behaviors. During a separate functional MRI session, mothers were exposed to their own infant's cry so...

This study investigated adrenocortical activity in response to different challenging and positive affect emotional contexts in child-mother dyads, as function of attachment security (children's secure base behaviors and mothers' attachment representations). Fifty-one children ranging in age from 18 to 26 months and their mothers participated in this study. Secure children showed significant inc...

The current study examined whether rumination serves as a moderator of the temporal association between maternal and child negative affect. Participants included 88 mothers with a history of major depressive episodes and their 123 children. During an initial assessment, mothers and their children completed measures assessing negative affect and children completed a measure assessing the tendenc...

OBJECTIVE Postpartum major depression is a significant public health problem that strikes 15% of new mothers and confers adverse consequences for mothers, children, and families. The neural mechanisms involved in postpartum depression remain unknown, but brain processing of affective stimuli appears to be involved in other affective disorders. The authors examined activity in response to negati...

While the neurobiology of post-traumatic stress disorder has been extensively researched, much less attention has been paid to the neural mechanisms underlying more covert but pervasive types of trauma (e.g., those involving disrupted relationships and insecure attachment). Here, we report on a neurobiological study documenting that mothers' attachment-related trauma, when unresolved, undermine...

BACKGROUND Research points to the importance of breastfeeding for promoting close mother-infant contact and social-emotional development. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have identified brain regions related to maternal behaviors. However, little research has addressed the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the relationship between breastfeeding and maternal behav...