Friday, April 4, 2025
4/4/2025
Maternal and Paternal Behavior Associated with Parent-Child Brain Synchrony - Project Summary Parental sensitivity, or the ability to accurately perceive and respond to children's signals1, is crucial for supporting the development of self-regulation in offspring2,3. The significance of maternal sensitivity in adaptive child development is well-known1,4–6, but fathers are understudied despite increasing involvement in caregiving7–10. Consequently, measures of parental sensitivity are often generalized from maternal research to paternal behavior, increasing the potential for bias and overlooking the nuance of paternal caregiving. According to the extended parent-child emotion regulation dynamics model11,12 and synchrony model3, brain and behavioral processes that are synchronous, or coordinated, between parents and children during interactions index more effective co-regulation and parent-child relationship quality13,14,15. Critically, both effects specific to and independent from caregivers' biological sex have been observed in relation to sensitive parent behaviors16–23, which likely contribute to parent-child biological synchrony. For example, biological females typically exhibit both verbal and nonverbal engagement with offspring while biological males exhibit more nonverbal engagement16–19, and both forms of sensitivity have been shown to support healthy development in offspring24–26. However, such effects are rarely analyzed in the context of single study across multiple levels of analysis. To provide a basic science foundation for a more holistic understanding of mothers and fathers as effective caregivers, I will test biological and behavioral mechanisms underlying parent-child interactions in mothers and fathers. I will use measures of verbal and nonverbal mentalizing, or the ability to understand children's mental states which underlies overt caregiving behavior, as an index of caregiver sensitivity24,25,27. I will also use measures of parent-child brain synchrony as an objective index of co-regulatory quality during interaction13. Using a publicly available dataset of concurrent Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) recordings from parent-child dyads (N=62; mother-child n=33, father-child n=29, child ages 34-60 months) during free play interaction, I will test whether the relation between parent mentalizing (verbal, nonverbal) and parent-child brain synchrony depends on maternal or paternal status in order to understand whether caregiving sensitivity manifests and/or differentially impacts parent-child interactions between biological male and female parents. To understand the development of differing but effective caregiving behaviors between biological male and female caregivers, I will also test parents' own caregiving histories as a predictor of mentalizing capacities (verbal, nonverbal) and parent-child brain synchrony. Overall, this work will provide further evidence for both sex-independent and sex-dependent caregiver behavioral effects on dyadic relations, highlighting the strengths of complementary but equally effective caregiving roles. Further, this work has the potential to inform future assessment and intervention supporting sensitive parent- child interactions among diverse caregivers, strengthening the overall family system.
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