Undergraduate Honors Projects – 2009 - 2010

The way a mother responds to her infant is vital for the development of a healthy child-caregiver attachment. Specific delivery types have been linked to important neurohormonal activity that can interfere with a parent’s acquistion of thoughts and behaviors facilitating healthy parenting (Swain et al., 2008). James Swain and colleagues (2008) discovered mothers who deliver vaginally (VD), compared to those who deliver by cesarean section (CSD), have heightened levels of maternal brain response to own infant cry in the anterior cingulate, insula and hypothalamus — areas of the brain associated with emotional response and hormone release. Additionally, mothers with depression are more likely to experience difficulty in making these connections and responding to their own infant’s needs. To further understand the effect of delivery within depressed mothers we examined patterns of maternal brain activation to their infant’s cry in two case comparison depressed mothers — one with a VD and one with an unplanned CSD — collected as part of a larger longitudinal study that assessed depressed, low SES mothers and their infants. We predicted lower activity in the CSD, compared to the VD mother, in the hypothalamus, midbrain, limbic system, and paralimbic system — areas of the brain associated with maternal parenting behavior in animals (Kendrick, 2000). Data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure each mother’s response to her own infant’s cry compared to a control sound. Counter to hypotheses, the VD mother did not reveal significant activation in the brain in response to her own infant greater than control sound. The CSD mother revealed significant (p<.05) clusters of own cry greater than control sound activation in the parahippocampal gyri, posterior cingulate, and precuneous cortex, areas of the brain relevant to memory encoding, episodic memory and reflections on the self. This pattern of activation may indicate the elicitation of memories of her child and reflections on the caregiver-infant relationship.