Neuro Harlow: The effect of a mother ’s touch on her child’s developing brain

In the 1950s, the American psychologist Harry Harlow famously showed that infant rhesus monkeys would rather cling to a surrogate wire mother covered in cosy cloth, than to one that provided milk. A loving touch is more important even than food, the findings seemed to show. Around the same time, the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby documented how human children deprived of motherly contact often go on to develop psychological problems. Now this line of research has entered the neuroscience era with a study in Cerebral Cortex claiming that children with more tactile mothers tend to have more developed social brains. Jens Brauer and his colleagues videoed 43 mum-child dyads as they sat together on a couch and played with a Playmobil Farm. The mothers knew they were being filmed but didn’t know the aims of the study. There were 24 boys and 19 girls and their average age was 5.5 years. Coders then watched back the videos and counted every instance that the mothers touched their child or vice versa. Finally and within the next two weeks, the researchers scanned each child’s brain while they lay as still as possible looking at a lava lamp screensaver (a brain imaging technique known as a resting-state scan). The researchers were particularly interested in levels of resting activity in the children’s brains in a network of areas known to be involved in functions such as empathy and thinking about other people’s mental states – sometimes referred to as the ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Brain Developmental Emotion Source Type: blogs