Recent neuroimaging studies have revealed specific parental neural responses to the stimuli involving infant’s face. However, it remains elusive whether specific neural responses occur in young nulliparous females who were trained to be childcare workers. Twenty-five females who underwent a one-month childcare training (experimental group) and 21 females who did not receive the training (control group) participated in fMRI experiments before and after the training. During fMRI scanning, they were presented with happy, neutral, and sad faces of infants one-by-one in pseudo-randomized order and asked to rate each face based on how positive or negative it was. Only in the experimental group, significant reductions in activity were found in the right amygdala for sad faces and in the left fusiform gyrus for all types of faces after the training. These results suggest that the childcare training affects brain responses to infant’s facial expression in the nulliparous young females.
Ayahito Ito, Katsuko Niwano, Motoko Tanabe, Yosuke Sato, Toshikatsu Fujii
