The associations of parental feeding practices and feeding style with childhood obesity have gained more attention in the literature recently; however, fathers are rarely included within these studies. The aim of this research was to determine the relationship of paternal feeding practices on child diet quality, weight status, and eating behavior, and the moderating effect of paternal feeding s...

Forming strong, equitable, and enduring social bonds with a few individuals in a group carries adaptive benefits in terms of increased longevity, offspring survival and paternity success in birds and mammals, including humans. These recent insights generated a new interest in the factors creating variation in the strength of social relationships. Whether and how animals discriminate paternal ki...

Paternal environmental experiences are significant predictors of developmental outcomes in offspring and can occur even in the absence of paternal care. Although there has been a recent focus on the role of environmentally induced changes in the male germline in producing these effects, the potential mediating role of mothers has not been investigated. A role for mothers in the transmission of ...

Paternal behavior is not innate but arises through social experience. After mating and becoming fathers, male mice change their behavior toward pups from infanticide to paternal care. However, the precise brain areas and circuit mechanisms connecting these social behaviors are largely unknown. Here we demonstrated that the c-Fos expression pattern in the four nuclei of the preoptic-bed nuclei o...

Although paternal ethanol (EtOH) abuse has been shown to affect the growth and behavior of offspring, the exact molecular and mechanistic basis remains largely unclear. Methylation alterations in imprinted genes may be related to well-documented teratogenic effects of ethanol. Here we show that chronic paternal ethanol exposure increases the susceptibility to abnormal behavior in offspring thro...

Research studies addressing the distinctions between adolescent fathers and non-fathers' paternal role perceptual development and performance are scarce. As a result, our understanding of the antecedents of early paternity among African-American adolescent males is unclear and intervention strategies remain virtually untapped. This gap in knowledge represents a challenge to both social science ...

This study examined the mediating role of coparenting in the association between differences/similarities in paternal and maternal socioeconomic status (SES) and paternal involvement in Chinese families. The sample included 244 couples with children aged 3-7 years. Fathers and mothers reported their individual incomes, educational levels, occupations, and coparenting behavior (measured using th...

For almost three decades, the association between paternal sensitivity and infant-father attachment security has been studied. The first wave of studies on the correlates of infant-father attachment showed a weak association between paternal sensitivity and infant-father attachment security (r = .13, p < .001, k = 8, N = 546). In the current paper, a meta-analysis of the association between pat...

Recent studies show that emotional and environmental stimuli promote epigenetic inheritance and influence behavioral development in the subsequent generations. Caloric mal- and under-nutrition has been shown to cause metabolic disturbances in the subsequent generation, but the incentive properties of paternal binge-like eating in offspring is still unknown. Here we show that paternal sucrose se...