For as long as anyone can remember, humans have identified and treated babies as special, almost like some sort of knee-jerk reaction. Long ago, Charles Darwin made it clear that there is some sort of adult-infant connection that allows the human race to survive. A recent study shows that this instinct to love and care for babies may be biological. This study reveals that the subconscious reactions adults have to infant faces differs greatly from their response to adult faces.

This study led by Morten Kringelbach and Alan Stein revealed that an area in the human brain, the medial orbitofrontal cortex, responds in less than a second after seeing the face of an infant, but not an adult face. This cranial region is located directly over the eyeballs, in front of the brain. Until this recent discovery, scientists, such as Konrad Lorenz had claimed that it was viewing the head structure of the infant which generated the response to treat a baby as special, yet a biological basis had not been discovered.

Kringelbach carefully gathered still frames of 27 infants who were videotaped in their own homes. Ninety-five female and male adults, including some who had never had children, were asked to rate emotional expressions of these babies from “very negative” to “very positive”.

Then, a research team from the University of Oxford used magnetoencephalography, a type of neuroimaging, to study twelve of the subjects at Aston University. The scanning technology provides images of the activity of the entire brain both incredibly quickly and at a very high resolution.

The participants in the study were asked to watch a red cross on a computer screen and to push a button if the red cross changed color. Between color changes, photos of unfamiliar adults and babies flashed on the screen for 300 milliseconds – not long enough for anyone to consciously register that it was happening.

The brain scans showed a wave of activity 1/7th of a second after each baby photo was flashed. This type of response was entirely too quick to not be instinctive. This reaction in the medial orbitofrontal cortex may explain many behaviors including what pulls a parent toward their child, why adults connect with and coo over babies, as well as why men are often attracted to women with infant-like features (which has been researched prior to the study). This segment of the brain which responds is a key region for emotions.

This study has potential to make a difference for the 13 to 15 percent of mothers (and 3 percent of fathers) that experience postnatal depression. People at the highest risk of developing postnatal depression may be identified by measuring the response in women and men. If the response to babies’ faces is not intense, they are more likely to become postnatally depressed or ignore their babies.

A professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan, Kent Berridge, was very impressed with Kringelbach’s confirmation of Darwin’s prediction about the wiring of human brains. He believes, “The beauty of Kringelbach and colleagues’ paper is its use of new baby faces that the adults hadn’t seen before, to rule out alternative explanations based solely on learning of social attachment.”

Kringelbach and Stein would eventually like to test the differences between men and women’s reactions, as well as if stimuli from other species, such as precious puppies, affect the human “love center” in the same way.

Source: RedOrbit, TX
http://tinyurl.com/3xd3kx