A baby s smile 'doesn t just warm a mother s heart it gives her a natural high,' reports the Daily Mail. The sight of a smiling infant can trigger the 'feel-good' part of the brain, the newspaper says.
The story is based on a small study which profiled the response of 28 mothers to seeing their child s facial expressions in comparison with an unknown child s face. Perhaps not surprisingly, the centres associated with pleasure were activated at the sight of smiling babies, and more so if the baby belonged to the mother. The findings may contribute to an understanding of how mothers bond with their babies. However, the practical use of such increased understanding is not currently clear.
Where did the story come from?
Dr Lane Strathearn and colleagues from Baylor College of Medicine in Texas and from University College London carried out this research. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Baylor Child Health Research Center, the Kane Family Foundation, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. It was published in the peer-reviewed medical journal: Pediatrics.
What kind of scientific study was this?
This was a cross-sectional study of women enrolled during their third trimester into a larger study of mother infant attachment. In this publication, the researchers explored how particular regions of a mother s brain (dopamine-associated reward processing areas known to be involved in the pleasure response) are activated in response to pictures of her infant experiencing different emotions.
Women were recruited from a variety of community settings, including prenatal clinics and local church groups, as well as through poster, magazine and internet adverts. The first-time mothers had not given birth to twins, they were all right-handed, non-smoking, were not currently taking psychotropic medications and did not have any contraindications to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Demographic information was collected from the eligible women, who also underwent a battery of tests to assess mental health, IQ and the type of relationships that mothers form with other people.
When the infants were seven months old, the researchers videotaped their facial expressions as they responded to different scenarios, including being left along in a room (where they cried) and playing with them using age-appropriate toys (where they smiled). Mothers were not present during this videotaping. The researchers then captured still images of happy, neutral and sad faces of each infant. They also captured facial expressions of a 'control' child (i.e. not belonging to any of the women in the study), which was matched to each infant for age, race and sometimes gender. The pictures were captured in a standard way, with the babies wearing a gender-neutral white jumpsuit.
