There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
<p class="first" id="d12814685e109">Emotional communication between parents and children
is crucial during early life,
yet little is known about its neural underpinnings. Here, we adopt a dual connectivity
approach to assess how positive and negative emotions modulate the interpersonal neural
network between infants and their mothers during naturalistic interaction. Fifteen
mothers were asked to model positive and negative emotions toward pairs of objects
during social interaction with their infants (mean age 10.3 months) whilst the neural
activity of both mothers and infants was concurrently measured using dual electroencephalography
(EEG). Intra-brain and inter-brain network connectivity in the 6-9 Hz range (i.e.
infant Alpha band) during maternal expression of positive and negative emotions was
computed using directed (partial directed coherence, PDC) and non-directed (phase-locking
value, PLV) connectivity metrics. Graph theoretical measures were used to quantify
differences in network topology as a function of emotional valence. We found that
inter-brain network indices (Density, Strength and Divisibility) consistently revealed
strong effects of emotional valence on the parent-child neural network. Parents and
children showed stronger integration of their neural processes during maternal demonstrations
of positive than negative emotions. Further, directed inter-brain metrics (PDC) indicated
that mother to infant directional influences were stronger during the expression of
positive than negative emotional states. These results suggest that the parent-infant
inter-brain network is modulated by the emotional quality and tone of dyadic social
interactions, and that inter-brain graph metrics may be successfully applied to examine
these changes in parent-infant inter-brain network topology.
</p>