Associations Between New Mothers’ Neural Reward Response and Perceptions of Their Own Infant

Reward responsiveness is a key process in social motivation and may support important caregiver social processes such as caregiver perceptions of their infant. Reward responsiveness is commonly measured at the neural level via the reward positivity (RewP), an event-related potential derived from electroencephalogram (EEG), in both monetary and social domains. The current study examined whether and to what degree the RewP, in response to monetary and personally salient social reward feedback, relates to mothers' perceptions of their infant during the early postpartum period (mean = 9.23 weeks post birth). Mothers (N = 91) completed two reward tasks while continuous EEG was recorded and provided descriptors of their infant's personality. The RewP was measured in response to a novel social incentive delay task (i.e., "winning" allowed participants to view a photo of their own infant) as well as a standard monetary incentive delay task. Both the social RewP and monetary RewP shared positive associations with mothers' perceptions of their infant (social: β = 0.39, 95% CI [0.07, 0.71], p = 0.016; monetary: β = 0.39, 95% CI [0.07, 0.71], p = 0.017). Together, results suggest mothers' neural motivational systems are related to how they perceive their child, with implications for understanding caregiver functioning and the caregiver-child relationship as context for child development.