Neurocognitive response to fearful faces in mothers

Emerging evidence highlights distinct neurocognitive adaptations during pregnancy and motherhood. This study investigated neural and cognitive responses to adult emotional expressions, focusing on fear and happiness, in 35 mothers with four-month-old infants and 19 control women without young children. Participants completed computerized tasks assessing accuracy in recognizing emotional facial expressions and underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while viewing fearful and happy adult faces. Compared to control women, mothers demonstrated heightened neural activation to fear versus happiness in occipital and orbitofrontal cortex, regions implicated in visual attention, emotional salience and emotion regulation, respectively. At a behavioural level, no differences in discrimination accuracy were observed between groups. However, greater activation in the orbitofrontal cortex to fearful faces in mothers correlated with higher sensitivity toward their infants during interactions. The findings suggest that enhanced neural vigilance to fear-related cues in mothers may be an adaptive mechanism supporting caregiving behaviour.