Eric D. Finegood

Parenting and Beyond: Common Neurocircuits Underlying Parental and Altruistic Caregiving

SYNOPSIS Interpersonal relationships constitute the foundation on which human society is based. The infant–caregiver bond is the earliest and most influential of these relationships. Driven by evolutionary pressure for survival, parents feel compelled to provide care to their biological offspring. However, compassion for non-kin is also ubiquitous in human societies, motivating individuals to suppress their own self-interests to promote the well-being of non-kin members of the society. We argue that the process of early kinship-selective parental care provides the foundation for non-exclusive altruism via the activation of a general Caregiving System that regulates compassion in any of its forms. We propose a tripartite structure of this system that includes (1) the perception of need in another, (2) a caring motivational or feeling state, and (3) the delivery of a helping response to the individual in need. Findings from human and animal research point to specific neurobiological mechanisms including activation of the insula and the secretion of oxytocin that support the adaptive functioning of this Caregiving System.

Psychobiological influences on maternal sensitivity in the context of adversity

This study evaluated prospective longitudinal relations among an index of poverty-related cumulative risk, maternal salivary cortisol, child negative affect, and maternal sensitivity across the first 2 postpartum years. Participants included 1,180 biological mothers residing in rural and predominantly low-income communities in the United States. Multilevel growth curve analyses indicated that an index of cumulative risk was positively associated with maternal cortisol across the postpartum (study visits occurring at approximately 7, 15, and 24 months postpartum) over and above effects for African American ethnicity, time of day of saliva collection, age, parity status, having given birth to another child, contraceptive use, tobacco smoking, body mass index, and breastfeeding. Consistent with a psychobiological theory of mothering, maternal salivary cortisol was negatively associated with maternal sensitivity observed during parent-child interactions across the first 2 postpartum years over and above effects for poverty-related cumulative risk, child negative affect, as well as a large number of covariates associated with cortisol and maternal sensitivity. Child negative affect expressed during parent-child interactions was negatively associated with observed maternal sensitivity at late (24 months) but not early time points of observation (7 months) and cumulative risk was negatively associated with maternal sensitivity across the postpartum and this effect strengthened over time. Results advance our understanding of the dynamic, transactional, and psychobiological influences on parental caregiving behaviors across the first 2 postpartum years. (PsycINFO Database Record

Parental brain and socioeconomic epigenetic effects in human development

Critically significant parental effects in behavioral genetics may be partly understood as a consequence of maternal brain structure and function of caregiving systems recently studied in humans as well as rodents. Key parental brain areas regulate emotions, motivation/reward, and decision making, as well as more complex social-cognitive circuits. Additional key environmental factors must include socioeconomic status and paternal brain physiology. These have implications for developmental and evolutionary biology as well as public policy.

Parenting in poverty: Attention bias and anxiety interact to predict parents’ perceptions of daily parenting hassles.

Research has long acknowledged the centrality of parents’ subjective experiences in the caregiving role for the organization of parenting behaviors and family functioning. Recent scientific advances in cognitive process models and in the neurobiology of parenting indicate that parenting is shaped in part by conscious and nonconscious cognitive processes. This study extends a growing literature on neurocognitive models of parenting by exploring the extent to which attention processes in parents operate independently and interactively with intrapsychic processes, proximal interpersonal stressors, and the larger socioeconomic context to predict perceptions of parenting hassles in primarily low-income Latino/a parents of young children living in urban areas of concentrated disadvantage (N = 185). Analyses indicated that parent reports of anxiety, intimate partner violence, and perceptions of financial hardship each uniquely predicted parents’ perceptions of daily parenting hassles. Parents’ attentional bias toward threat interacted with anxiety symptoms such that parents experiencing high levels of attention bias toward threat in combination with high levels of anxiety reported significantly more daily parenting hassles. Findings from the current study provide insight into the ways in which neurocognitive processes affect one aspect of parenting, with implications for programs and policies designed to support parenting for families in poverty.

Poverty, Parent Stress, and Emerging Executive Functions in Young Children

Executive functions are higher-order cognitive abilities that support decision-making, reasoning, planning, reflective processes, and abstract thinking. Recent work suggests that the development of these abilities in early life is, in part, socially mediated—that the emergence of executive functions across childhood is partially organized by children’s relationships with other individuals, and with relationships to caregivers in particular. Using the basic association between the development of executive functions and children’s relationships with caregivers as a starting point, this chapter seeks to better understand the broader association observed across many studies between one of the most clearly stressful contexts for parents—poverty—and executive function development in children. Specifically, this chapter considers the extent to which the immediate caregiving environments of children can be viewed as a mediator of the relation between the socioeconomic conditions of families and children’s executive function development. In doing so, this chapter also considers several aspects of the caregiving environment that may be influenced by the context of poverty (e.g., parents’ own stress processes and behaviors with children, the home learning environment, and parents’ own cognitive and biobehavioral regulation) that are also presumed to shape children’s neurocognitive growth. Future directions emphasize the need for more experimental work in this area of research, the need for more research that distinguishes specific parent stress processes related to children’s executive function development in the context of poverty, and the need to consider the larger socioecological contexts in which children and families are embedded to understand the etiology and development of family stress processes related to children’s emerging self-regulation.

Salivary cortisol and cognitive development in infants from low-income communities

Abstract Early stress exposure is proposed to have significant lasting effects on cognitive development. The glucocorticoid hormone cortisol, a product of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis, is a particular focus of research, however, the majority of past research has been based on studies of older children and adults. Evidence linking cortisol levels in infancy with cognitive development is lacking. In a large cohort sample of infants (N = 1091) oversampled for psychosocial risk, we tested whether basal cortisol levels and cortisol reactivity to emotional stressors administered at 7 and 15 months of age were associated with cognitive development measured at 15 months. Cognitive development was measured using the Mental Development Index of the Bayley Scales of Infant Development. Multiple regression analyses indicated that basal cortisol levels at 15 months, and to a lesser extent at seven months, were inversely associated with infant cognitive development after adjusting for psychosocial and obstetric risk. The findings provide some of the first evidence that HPA axis activity in infancy is associated with early cognitive development.