Fathers who are the primary caregivers of their newborn experience maternal brain changes that make them more likely to worry about their child's safety.
These fathers show signs of changes in the amygdala that causes them to experience similar parental emotions as mothers do, HealthDay reported.
The finding suggests that neural networks in the brain respond to parenting roles.
"Pregnancy, childbirth and lactation are very powerful primers in women to worry about their child's survival," study senior author Ruth Feldman, a researcher in the department of psychology and the Gonda Brain Sciences Center at Bar-Ilan University in Israel told HealthDay. "Fathers have the capacity to do it as well as mothers, but they need daily caregiving activities to ignite that mothering network."
To study these differences researchers looked at the first 89 times both fathers and mothers interacted with their children. The participants included 20 secondary care-giving heterosexual mothers; 21 primary care-giving heterosexual fathers; and 48 primary-care giving heterosexual men.
"It's not something you can find in the animal world, and it's not something you could find in humans until very recently -- two committed fathers raising a child," Feldman said. In these relationships one member of the couple considered themselves the primary caregiver.
The team performed brain scans to see what regions would activate when the individuals interacted with their children. The team found a dramatic difference between the brains of the mothers who were primary caregivers and the fathers who were secondary caregivers.
The women showed more activity in their amygdala, which is responsible for emotional processing.
"They are the worriers," Feldman said. "They are much more primed by pregnancy and childbirth to be aware of infant danger signals."
The fathers showed more activity in the superior temporal sulcus, which is involved in "logical tasks related to social interaction."
"In fathers, their parenting is guided much more by understanding and empathizing in a cognitive way," Feldman said.
The team found that when a man took on the role as primary caregiver there was activity in both of these brain regions.
"They have the father's cognitive structures, but the amygdala is sensitive to child-care experiences and it can activate to the level of mothers," Feldman said.
