Parental Brain Responses to Own and Unknown Children’s Emotional Facial Expressions: An fMRI Study

The parent-child relationship is crucial for children's socio-emotional development. Previous research, mostly in mothers of infants, has implicated neural networks subserving reward, saliency, and theory of mind (ToM). In this pre-registered study, we sought to extend these findings to fathers and older children by examining maternal and paternal brain responses to preschool-aged children’s emotional faces. Our investigation included 89 parents (41 mothers, 48 fathers) and their children (44 daughters, 45 sons). We examined the effects of children’s facial identity (own, unknown) and emotion (happy, neutral, sad) on parental neural activity and tested for associations with parental and child biological sex as well as parental involvement and sensitivity. Whole-brain analyses revealed differential neural activation within saliency and ToM networks related to children’s identity (own > unknown), and in the postcentral gyrus related to both children’s emotion (own sad > own happy) and biological sex. Notably, mothers’ and fathers’ neural responses were comparable. Subsequent ROI analyses, however, revealed a distinct parent by child biological sex interaction because fathers showed less ventromedial prefrontal cortex recruitment to daughters’ happy faces with increasing parental sensitivity. Taken together, this study advances our understanding of the neural underpinnings of parents’, and specifically fathers’ emotional child face processing.