A meta-analysis of parent neural responses: The role of child emotion, child age, and parent gender

• Parenting is crucial for healthy child development and positive behavioral outcomes. • Understanding of the neuroscience of parenting is growing but detailed meta-analyses are needed. • We meta-analysed parent neuroimaging studies grouped by background and interpersonal variables. • A system of related brain networks that support salience detection, emotional learning, and contextual valuation and interface with reward circuitry, was significantly related to parental responses to children. • The relationship between these networks and parent responses was more pronounced in studies with mothers, young children, and children with negative emotion. Parenting is foundational to child development and is predictive of trajectories toward or away from behavioral problems, including substance misuse. Recent studies have turned to neuroimaging to better understand parenting, given important implications for prevention. Growing literature on the neuroscience of parenting highlights that parents activate various subcortical and corticolimbic brain networks when they respond to child stimuli and this may serve a basis for sensitive parenting, possibly protecting against development of offspring substance misuse. Outstanding questions remain, however, regarding the role of background and interpersonal factors in parent neural responses. Thus, building from previous meta-analyses, we conducted additional meta-analyses to explore the role of child emotion, child age, and parent sex in parental responses. We followed PRISMA guidelines and searched PubMed, PsychInfo, and Google Scholar (last searched October 2022) which identified 36 studies, including 1136 participants, meeting inclusion (i.e., fMRI study, whole-brain analysis) and exclusion (i.e., did not report coordinates) criteria. 62% of studies scanned mothers, 38% scanned fathers, and included children were between 0-12 years old. Results were analyzed using Activation Likelihood Estimation and bias was assessed. Results showed consistent recruitment of frontoinsular, corticolimbic, temporal regions and sensory cortex regions, particularly in studies with mothers, children with negative emotion, and in young children. Although not the sum total of the traditional reward system, these maternal neural responses involve brain systems modulating salience, emotion, and reward which may override caregiving rewards and, in turn, play crucial roles in parental motivation and sensitivity. As a result, these neural activation patterns may predispose mothers to adaptive parenting and, in turn, decrease risk for adverse child outcomes, such as substance misuse. Confirmation of these findings in more ethnically diverse samples and with greater specificity and generalizability are needed to guide development of parenting interventions to strengthen neural circuits associated with sensitive parenting.