A new study has found that fathers who spend more time with their children could develop "maternal" brains.
Researchers from the Department of Psychology and the Gonda Brain Sciences Center at Bar-Ilan University in Israel found that fathers who put more time into taking care of their newborn children showed changes in brain activity. They observed more activity in the amygdala and other emotional-processing systems - changes similar to the parental emotions that mothers usually experience, such as being concerned about their baby's safety.
"Pregnancy, childbirth and lactation are very powerful primers in women to worry about their child's survival. Fathers have the capacity to do it as well as mothers, but they need daily caregiving activities to ignite that mothering network," Ruth Feldman, lead author of the study, said to Healthday News.
The research team compared the brains of fathers and mothers by studying 89 first time parents while they were with their children. There were 20 primary-caregiving heterosexual mothers and 21 secondary-caregiving heterosexual fathers. They also studied 48 homosexual fathers who were raising infants as primary caregivers in a committed relationship. The researchers focused their observation on how parenting roles in fathers affected brain activity.
In addition, the participants underwent brain scans for the researchers to determine which part of the mid was activated when videos of the interactions between parents and children were shown. In the study, mothers demonstrated five times more activity in the amygdala and other emotion-processing structures in the brain. In contrast, the fathers showed more activity in the superior temporal sulcus - a region in the brain that does logical tasks related to social interaction.
Conversely, fathers who took the primary caregiving role displayed that both parenting regions in the brain became active. This indicated that the fathers' brains adjusted to a more active parenting role.
Results of the study were published in the May 26 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
