Maternal behavior is a primary social characteristic of mammals. By studying maternal behavior in rats, broader inferences can be made about the neural circuits that influence maternal behavior in other mammals, including humans. Maternal behavior of rats includes nest building, pup grooming, nursing, and pup retrieval. The projections from the medial preoptic area of the hypothalamus (MPOA) to...

This study's objective was to examine the association between maternal smoking during pregnancy and childhood aggressive behavior in African-American and Puerto Rican children, as well as the relationship between maternal unconventional behavior, low maternal affection, and offspring aggression. Participants consisted of African-American and Puerto Rican children (N = 203; mean age = 8.6, SD = ...

reproductive behavior of 1525 pregnant woman were studied in the time of termination of pregnancy in relation to maternal age, education, prenatal care and the number of previous pregnancies. the results show that the frequency of maternal attendance at the centers of prenatal care is significantly related to maternal education. and the total pregnancies per woman are inversely correlated with ...

High levels of aggressive behaviors against intruders in the nest area are displayed by female rats during the first 10 days after delivery, declining thereafter to very low levels, even though lactation continues. Cross-fostering experiments were undertaken to test the hypothesis that pup age may affect aggression in lactating rats. The behavior of females on the 8th day after delivery when ra...

We apply a biopsychosocial conceptualization to attention development in the 1st year and examine the role of neurophysiological and social processes on the development of early attention processes. We tested whether maternal behavior measured during 2 mother-child interaction tasks when infants (N = 388) were 5 months predicted infant medial frontal (F3/F4) EEG power and observed attention beh...

Impaired onset of maternal behavior in first generation rat dams was previously correlated with rearing by cocaine-treated dams and prenatal cocaine exposure. Pup-induced maternal behavior in non-lactating rats has not been examined with regard to cocaine exposure and rearing conditions. First generation male and female juveniles and young adult males reared by cocaine-treated or control dams a...

The perinatal development of the nervous system is influenced by different external and internal stimuli. Previous data show that maternal care and perinatal inflammation can induce long-term changes in anxiety- and depression-related behavior. Our hypothesis is that both maternal care and perinatal inflammation act through interacting biological pathways to program adult behavior. To evaluate ...

Structural equation modeling was used to simultaneously examine maternal psychological distress and social support as mediators linking maternal childhood trauma (MCT) to both maternal and child-reported behavior at 9 years of age in 231 birth mother-child dyads, who were primarily poor, urban, and African American. One half of the mothers (n = 116) reported a history of childhood abuse and neg...

A series of experiments were conducted to determine whether and under what conditions central prolactin (PRL) administration would stimulate the onset of maternal behavior in female rats and to identify possible neural sites of PRL action. In each experiment ovariectomized, nulliparous rats whose endogenous PRL levels were suppressed with bromocriptine were tested for maternal behavior toward f...