Parent brain responses to child facial and vocal communication: What different methodologies reveal about parenting cognitions and practices as well as their moderation by parental status, gender, and culture as well as child characteristics

Abstract

Parenting is constituted of caregiving cognitions and practices, based in evolution and biology as well as culture and context, and lodged in nervous system structure and function. This narrative review first discusses parenting and an orientation toward caregiving in terms of its nature, constituents, and goals. Next, the review operationalizes parenting cognitions and practices that are expressed in response to facial and vocal cues of young offspring and revealed in naturalistic and experimental studies using behavioral preferences, attention tasks, and implicit association tests. Studies of autonomic and central nervous system structures and functions in the service of parenting are subsequently reviewed. Taken together, these investigations of the parent nervous system reveal associations with, and likely neuropsychological underpinnings of, parenting cognitions and practices and begin to unveil specific mechanisms and loci in the human nervous system that define a neuroscience of parenting.