A research group led by Professor Masako Meiwa of Kyoto University conducted a study on mothers who are raising children and women who have no experience of giving birth or raising children. For the first time, it was revealed that the emotion estimation became more accurate, and that mothers with a higher tendency to anxiety became more sensitive to the perception of facial expressions in infants and adults.
Previous studies have shown that accumulating care experience changes the caregiver's behavior and brain response to infant behavior.However, the relationship with the premise "ability to sensitively perceive the other person's facial expression and accurately estimate emotions from it" was unclear.
Therefore, the research group is targeting mothers who are raising 7 to 12 months old babies at the first birth and adult females of the same age who have no experience of childbirth or childcare. It was verified whether there are individual differences in.As a result, those who have experienced child-rearing (mothers) read emotions more accurately from the facial expressions of adults, and there are certain individual differences in the sensitivity of the mother's facial expression perception. It was found that the facial expressions (sad facial expressions of infants and happy facial expressions of adults) were perceived more sensitively.
In the future, we will examine how individual differences in facial expression perception sensitivity and accuracy are reflected in daily nurturing behavior, and how they are related to neuroendocrine hormones such as oxytocin and physiological stress. It's called an issue.The scientific elucidation of these problems will lead to an essential understanding of postpartum depression and child-rearing stress, which are urgent issues for modern society, and concrete discussions on how to solve them.
Paper information:[PLOS ONE] Maternal nurturing experience affects the perception and recognition of adult and infant facial expressions
