Behavioral and neural correlates of parenting self-evaluation in mothers of young children

Abstract

In this study, we utilized a novel fMRI paradigm to examine the behavioral and neural correlates of parenting self-evaluation in a sample of mothers with at least one child under the age of 4 (N = 37). Prior self-report, behavioral and observational research document the implications of parenting self-evaluations for parent well-being and caregiving behavior; however, relatively little is known about the neural circuitry underlying these self-referential processes and to what extent they are influenced by caregiving experience. Although neuroimaging paradigms indexing other aspects of parental function exist, this is the first to use functional neuroimaging to study parenting self-evaluation in a controlled laboratory setting. We found parenting self-evaluations elicited significantly greater activity across most cortical midline structures, including the medial prefrontal cortex compared to control evaluations; these findings converge with previous work on the neural underpinning of general trait self-evaluation. Notable differences by parity were observed in exploratory analyses: specifically, primiparous mothers endorsed a higher number of developmentally supportive traits, exhibited faster reaction times, and showed a greater difference in mPFC activity when making self-evaluations of developmentally supportive traits than of developmentally unsupportive traits, compared to multiparous mothers. Implications of these findings and study limitations are discussed.

Figures

Fig. 1.

Example Self (top) and Change (bottom) blocks from the PSET. The task included two runs, with 10 blocks per run. Each block began with a 4.7-s cue instructing participants how to respond to the following trials, followed by five to six trials of 4.7 s each separated by a jittered inter-stimulus-interval (ISI) averaging 277 ms. Blocks were separated by a jittered rest period averaging 4.98 s. A total of 26 trials were conducted in each of 4 conditions: instruction block (self, change) by trial type (developmentally supportive, developmentally unsupportive). Each trial (see Table 1 for stimuli) was seen under each instruction, and traits were mixed within blocks. General code can be found at gitlab.com/dsnlab/svc.

Fig. 2.

Main effect of parenting self-evaluation vs malleability evaluation. Across all 37 subjects, the contrast of Self > Change was calculated across both types of parenting qualities (voxel-wise threshold of P <0.001 combined with a spatial threshold k = 46 corresponds to an FWE-corrected false-probability of P <0.05 across the whole brain). Illustrated here are the network of CMS involved in self-evaluation. The mPFC ROI is outlined in white.

Fig. 3.

Illustration of the significant effect of parity group on the relationship between percent of self-endorsed DU qualities and Self > Change activity in the mPFC ROI (F(1, 33) = 5.54, P =0.024).