Maternal bonding problems relate to aberrant neural processing of infant emotions during the first year postpartum: Results of an adapted fMRI Emotional GoNoGo Task

Maternal bonding refers to the unique emotional connection between a mother and her baby that gradually develops during the peripartum period. However, 3–24% of women report bonding problems (BP), often accompanied by constraints for the mother-infant relationship, but not always depression with consequences for child development. Our present study investigates the neural and behavioral patterns that underlie the processing of emotional infant stimuli over the 1st year postpartum parallel to a neurofeedback intervention. Mothers with and without BP (N = 45) completed a newly developed Emotional Infant GoNoGo Task during fMRI scanning at 3, 6 and 12 months postpartum. Our results show that response inhibition towards emotional infant faces elicits stronger results than towards adult faces in all mothers. While behavioral performance in BP is impaired, the neural responses to emotional infant faces as compared to neutral faces are increased at 3 months postpartum in limbic structures such as the anterior cingulate and insula, as well as nucleus caudatus. At 6 and 12 months behavioral reactions assimilate in BP to those of healthy controls, while differences in neural reactions between BP and healthy controls increase at 6 months and decrease again at 12 months. These effects are independent of depressive symptoms. Our findings point to an experience-based adaptive process of emotion processing and responses to infants’ affect during the first year postpartum as a specific characteristic of clinical BP. Implications are for potential therapeutic interventions to target emotion processing and regulation.