New Study Shows How Dads Bond With Their Kids

A new brain imaging study shows that fathers given the hormone oxytocin show increased activity in brain regions associated with reward and empathy when viewing photos of their toddlers.

“Our findings add to the evidence that fathers, and not just mothers, undergo hormonal changes that are likely to facilitate increased empathy and motivation to care for their children,” said lead author Dr. James Rilling, an Emory University anthropologist and director of the Laboratory for Darwinian Neuroscience.

“They also suggest that oxytocin, known to play a role in social bonding, might someday be used to normalize deficits in paternal motivation, such as in men suffering from postpartum depression.”

According to the researcher, the study is the first to look at the influence of oxytocin and vasopressin, another hormone linked to social bonding, on brain function in fathers.

A growing body of literature shows that an involved father plays a role in reducing child mortality and morbidity, as well as improving social, psychological and educational outcomes, the researcher noted.

But not every father takes a “hands-on” approach to caring for his children.

“I’m interested in understanding why some fathers are more involved in caregiving than others,” Rilling says. “In order to fully understand variation in caregiving behavior, we need a clear picture of the neurobiology and neural mechanisms that support the behavior.”

Researchers have long known that when women go through pregnancy they experience dramatic hormonal changes that prepare them for child rearing. Oxytocin, in particular, was traditionally considered a maternal hormone since it is released into the bloodstream during labor and nursing and facilitates the processes of birth, bonding with the baby, and milk production.

More recently, however, it became clear that men can also undergo hormonal changes when they become fathers, including increases in oxytocin, according to researchers.

Evidence shows that, in fathers, oxytocin facilitates physical stimulation of infants during play, as well as the ability to synchronize their emotions with their children.

To investigate the neural mechanisms involved in oxytocin and paternal behavior, Rilling’s lab used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to compare neural activity in men with and without doses of oxytocin, administered through a nasal spray.

The participants in the experiment were all healthy fathers of toddlers, between the ages of one and two.

While undergoing fMRI brain scans, each participant was shown a photo of his child, a photo of a child he did not know, and a photo of an adult he did not know.

When viewing an image of their child, fathers dosed with oxytocin showed significantly increased neural activity in brain systems associated with reward and empathy, compared to placebo.

This heightened activity in the caudate nucleus, dorsal anterior cingulate and visual cortex suggests that doses of oxytocin may augment feelings of reward and empathy in fathers, as well as their motivation to pay attention to their children, according to the study’s findings.

Surprisingly, the study results did not show a significant effect of vasopressin on the neural activity of fathers, contrary to the findings of some previous studies on animals, the researchers noted.

Research in prairie voles, which bond for life, for instance, has shown that vasopressin promotes both pair-bonding and paternal caregiving.

“It could be that evolution has arrived at different strategies for motiving paternal caregiving in different species,” Rilling said.

The study was published in the journal Hormones and Behavior.

Source: Emory University

Parent Training Shows Promise for ADHD Treatment in Japan

A new Japanese research study suggests a parent-training program for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder might prove to be an effective mainstream behavioral treatment.

Researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) say the new approach is geared to develop culturally appropriate parent-training programs for Japanese families of children with ADHD.

The study appears in the journal Japanese Psychological Research.

In the proof-of-concept program, researchers found reductions in children’s ADHD symptoms and improvements in parent-child relationships.

International guidelines for the management of ADHD in children recommend approved medications and/or behavioral therapy. However, compared with many Western countries, Japan has fewer pharmacological and behavioral options. The availability of behavioral therapy is further limited by a shortage of trained specialists.

Researchers first recruited Japanese parents of children with ADHD for a pilot study using standard behavioral strategies to see if Japanese parents would be comfortable with the program content, assessment strategies, and group delivery of the program.

Though the researchers did not specify the gender of the parents, only mothers contacted the researchers to participate in the study and five mothers were recruited for the study.

The mothers embraced the group setting, expressing the importance of interacting with other mothers who could understand the challenges of parenting a child with ADHD.

However, they articulated a desire to have more information about the causes of ADHD as well as extra practice using behavioral strategies specifically targeting ADHD. In response, the OIST researchers adapted the New Forest Parenting Programm, with the support of the program originators, for use with Japanese parents.

“It is important that children with ADHD are rewarded with positive praise after engaging in appropriate behaviors,” said Dr. Shizuka Shimabukuro from OIST’s Human Development Neurobiology Unit, who is the driving force behind adapting the NFPP for Japanese families.

“In general, Japanese parents praise their children more sparingly than Western parents. Overcoming this cultural norm can be challenging for many mothers.”

Based on the feedback from the pilot study, researchers in OIST’s Human Development Neurobiology Unit recruited mothers only for the proof-of-concept study.

They modified the program to replace four general parenting strategy sessions with six sessions that were specifically designed for parents of children with ADHD. They also added five extra support sessions to the beginning of the training program to increase mothers’ understanding of ADHD and increase their confidence in participating in the parenting program.

The researchers then conducted a proof-of-concept study with the new extended program, known as the NFPP-Japan, with 17 Japanese mothers, to assess the effects of the program on child behavior, mothers’ well-being, and parenting skills.

Mothers’ reports before and after the program indicated significant reductions in children’s ADHD symptoms, reductions in mothers’ reactivity to their child’s behavioral difficulties, and reductions in the stress they experienced in their roles as parents.

“Because the results of the study are based on self-reports from the mothers, we cannot rule out that the positive results we saw are due to changes in mothers’ perceptions of, or attitudes toward, their child’s behavior,” said Professor Gail Tripp, head of OIST’s Human Development Neurobiology Unit.

“Nevertheless, improving the parent-child relationship is an important step in managing ADHD.”

Future studies of the NFPP-Japan will focus on using objective evaluations of child behavior and the parent child-relationship.

A randomized control trial of the NFPP-Japan is currently underway. If the program proves successful, it might eventually become generally available in Japan as an effective treatment for managing symptoms of ADHD.

Source: Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology

What Motivates Teens to Exercise?

Unless actively involved in sports, many students entering high school drop their activity levels to a minimum, setting the stage for sedentary-related adult diseases. In a new pilot study, researchers set out to investigate what types of energy levels and mindsets tend to prompt __teens to exercise. For example, are __teens more likely to exercise when they are feeling down? Or when they are feeling good and energetic?

The findings show that when it comes to exercise, teens are far too unique in their mindsets and motivations to use a one-size-fits-all intervention.

“You might assume that if you had higher positive affect and felt energetic, you would be more likely to exercise, but we found that this is not true for everyone,” said study leader Dr. Christopher Cushing, assistant professor of clinical child psychology and University of Kansas (KU) Life Span Institute assistant scientist.

“For some of our participants, feeling happy with lots of energy predicted exercise, while for others the relationship was in the opposite direction.”

For the study, 26 adolescents reported their mood and energy four times a day for 20 days with an Android smartphone app developed by the KU research team.

The students were asked to rate positive affect (feeling happy), negative affect (feeling sad) as well as whether and to what degree they felt energetic or fatigued. The researchers then combined those reports with physical activity data collected from an activity tracker that the teens wore 24 hours a day.

Cushing said that this is a big advancement in the field of health behavior.

“If you think about the kind of advice a clinician would want to give to a patient, this study shows that adolescents are too different from each other to rely on a one-size-fits-all recommendation that is typical in practice. We need to know something about the person before giving a standard set of advice.”

A long-term goal of this research is to design an intervention system that would personalize prompts based on each individual’s optimum times to exercise as gleaned from data collected from reported internal states.

Cushing said that they were also able to answer the question of whether adolescents would even want to participate in this kind of study — one that required a lot of time and energy throughout the day. The study got a very high response rate and nearly all of the participants said they would do it again if their physician asked them to in order to better understand their health.

“Teens are willing to do it if they think they’ll learn something about the relationship between how they feel and important health behaviors they are interested in tracking or improving,” he said.

The researchers want to focus on increasing the physical activity of adolescents because high school is a time when most adolescents drop from a pattern of moderate activity to the kind of minimal activity that predisposes them for diseases as adults.

“We want to help them find opportunities for leisure time physical activities outside of the structure of school, and we think it makes sense to do that in a way that is personalized for each adolescent,” said Cushing.

“By the time a person reaches adulthood, patterns of behavior are relatively well-established. We think it is a harder proposition to get an adult off of the couch after they have slipped into a pattern of inactivity than to help an adolescent who is moderately active maintain some of that activity as they age into adulthood.”

The study is published in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology.

Source: University of Kansas, Life Span Institute

Recent Progress Seen in Lessening Cognitive, Motor Delays in Very Premature Babies

Extremely preterm babies — those born between 22 to 24 weeks gestation — continue to face unfavorable odds, as only about one in three survive. But a new study led by Duke Health shows that these rates are slowly improving. The findings show that, compared to extremely preterm babies born a decade earlier, a larger percentage are developing into toddlers without signs of moderate or severe cognitive and motor delay.

Improvements in survival and neurodevelopment may be the result of a number of factors, including decreasing rates of infection in the infants, along with the increased use of steroids in expectant mothers that can help mature and strengthen the fetus’s lungs prior to birth, according to the authors.

“The findings are encouraging,” said lead author Noelle Younge, M.D., a neonatologist and assistant professor of pediatrics at Duke. “We see evidence of improvement over time. But we do need to keep an eye on the overall numbers, as a large percentage of infants born at this stage still do not survive. Those who survive without significant impairment at about age two are still at risk for numerous other challenges to their overall health.”

For the study, the researchers looked at data of 4,274 infants born between the 22nd and 24th week of pregnancy, far earlier than the 37 to 40 weeks of a full-term pregnancy. The babies were hospitalized at 11 academic medical centers in the Neonatal Research Network, part of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health.

About 30 percent of the infants born at the beginning of the study (between 2000 and 2003) survived. That number increased to 36 percent for babies born toward the end of the study (from 2008 to 2011), with the best outcomes for children born at 23 and 24 weeks. Overall survival for babies born at 22 weeks remained the same throughout the study, at just 4 percent.

Over the 12-year study period, the number of infants who survived but were found to have cognitive and motor impairment at 18 to 22 months stayed about the same (about 14 to 16 percent). However, the percentage of infants who survived without evidence of moderate or severe neurological impairment improved from 16 percent to 20 percent.

“Researchers in the Neonatal Research Network reported in 2015 that survival was increasing in this vulnerable population. One concern was that the improved survival might have been accompanied by a greater number of infants who went on to have impairments in the long term, such as cerebral palsy, developmental delay, hearing and vision loss,” said Younge.

“However, we actually are seeing a slight improvement. Because children continue to develop over years, it’s important to continue to track this data so families and providers can make the best decisions in caring for these infants.”

These improvements may be due to a number of factors, including lower rates of infection in the infants and increased use of steroids in expectant mothers. Steroids can help mature and strengthen the fetus’s lungs prior to birth. At the beginning of the study, 58 percent of the expectant mothers had received steroids to boost fetal development. That figure increased to 64 percent by the end of the study.

“The culture of neonatal intensive care units has really changed in the past decade,” said senior author C. Michael Cotten, M.D., a neonatologist and professor of pediatrics at Duke. “We’ve taken a big focus on preventing infections, and there’s a lot more encouragement and support for the use of mother’s milk than there was 15 years ago, which has also been linked to better outcomes.”

Extremely preterm infants are highly susceptible to infections. Neonatal intensive care units have reported steady decreases in infection rates among extremely preterm infants over the past two decades.

“This is important because infections have been associated with greater risk of neurologic problems,” Cotten said.

The study is published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Source: Duke Health

Youths’ Cognitive Functions Tied To Soccer Success

Working memory and other cognitive functions in children and young people can be associated with how successful they are on the soccer field, according to a new study.

Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden note that clubs that focus too much on physical attributes risk overlooking future stars.

Physical attributes such as size, fitness and strength, in combination with ball control, have long been considered critical factors in the hunt for new talent in soccer — or football, as it is known in most of the world.

The third, slightly elusive factor of “game intelligence” — to always be at the right place at the right time — has been difficult to measure.

In 2012, researchers at the Karolinska Institutet provided a possible scientific explanation for the phenomenon, and showed that executive cognitive functions in adult players could be associated with their success on the soccer field.

In a new study, published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, the researchers show that cognitive faculties can be similarly quantified and linked to how well children and young people do in the game.

“This is interesting since football clubs focus heavily on the size and strength of young players,” said study leader Dr. Predrag Petrovic of Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Clinical Neuroscience. “Young players who have still to reach full physical development rarely get a chance to be picked as potential elite players, which means that teams risk missing out on a new Iniesta or Xavi.”

Executive functions are special control functions in the brain that allow us to adapt to an environment in a perpetual state of change, the researchers explain. They include creative thinking in order to quickly switch strategy, find new, effective solutions, and repress erroneous impulses. The functions are dependent on the brain’s frontal lobes, which continue to develop until the age of 25.

For the new study, the researchers measured certain executive functions in 30 elite players between the ages of 12 and 19, and then cross-referenced the results with the number of goals they scored during two years. The metrics were taken in part using the same standardized tests used in healthcare.

Strong results for several executive functions were found to be associated with success on the field, even after controlling for other factors that could conceivably affect performance, according to the study’s findings.

The clearest link was seen for simpler forms of executive function, such as working memory, which develops relatively early in life.

“This was expected since cognitive function is less developed in young people than it is in adults, which is probably reflected in how young people play, with fewer passes that lead to goals,” said Petrovic.

The young elite players also performed significantly better than the average population in the same age group on several tests of executive function, the study discovered.

Whether these faculties are inherited or can be trained remains the object of future research, as does the importance of the different executive functions for the various positions on the field, the researchers said.

“We think that the players’ positions on the pitch are linked to different cognitive profiles,” Petrovic said. “I can imagine that trainers will start to use cognitive tests more and more, both to find talented newcomers and to judge the position they should play in.”

Source: Karolinska Institutet

Very Responsive Moms Can Have Big Impact on Fragile X Kids’ Development

A new study finds that a highly responsive mother has a significant impact on the positive development of communication and language skills in children with Fragile X syndrome (FXS), the leading genetic cause of autism and other intellectual disabilities.

The findings show that maternal responsiveness is also positively tied to the children’s socialization and daily living skills and may even mitigate the declines often reported in children with FXS beginning in middle childhood.

The study followed 55 children from ages two to ten and is still continuing into adolescence.

The researchers focused on a set of specific maternal behaviors, collectively called maternal responsivity, in the family home. These included commenting on the child’s behavior and/or focus of attention; requesting a verbal response; and verbally “recoding” or restating and/or expanding what a child says.

“Our discovery of the impact of contingent maternal responsivity on child adaptive behavior development underscores the fact that the manifestation of FXS is not just the product of biology, but is ultimately attributable to the dynamic interaction of biology, behavior and environment over lengthy periods of time,” said Steven Warren, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Speech-Language-Hearing: Science & Disorders at the University of Kansas.

The positive impact of sustained high levels of maternal responsivity from toddlerhood through middle childhood was true even for children with more severe autistic symptoms and lower nonverbal cognitive development levels.

“Our researchers painstakingly coded each instance of maternal behavior toward their child, said Nancy Brady, Ph.D., associate professor of Speech-Language-Hearing. “This allowed us to discover that Mom’s behaviors, like responding to all communication, even nonverbal communication, has important implications down the road.”

Previously, the researchers reported that 56 percent of the children in the study showed declines in adaptive behavior at or before the age of ten, with an average age of seven years for the beginning of the decline, both in relation to their peers and in absolute terms.

But the present analysis showed that these declines did not occur or were substantially less for children with highly responsive mothers.

The findings may have important clinical and educational implications for children with FXS, said Brady. “We see no downside and potentially a considerable upside in training efforts aimed at enhancing and supporting sustained highly responsive parenting for children with FXS during both early and middle childhood.”

In their previous research, Brady and Warren found that vocabulary growth in children with FXS was associated with mothers who displayed greater early and sustained responsivity up until their children reached the age of nine. Again, this was not dependent on the child’s nonverbal IQ, autism symptoms or the education level of the mother but showed the unique contribution of maternal responsivity.

“There is no doubt that parenting plays a dynamic, cumulative role in human development in concert with biology and other environmental forces,” said Warren.

“Our ability to understand these effects is greatly enhanced by long term longitudinal studies that allow us to observe how these forces interact across development. Ultimately the knowledge gained from these studies should pave the way for increasingly effective interventions and treatments.”

Source: University of Kansas, Life Span Institute

Preschoolers May Come to Share Personality Traits

New research finds that when preschoolers spend time around one another, they tend to take on each other’s’ personalities.

The Michigan State University study suggests personality is shaped by environment and not just genes.

“Our finding, that personality traits are ‘contagious’ among children, flies in the face of common assumptions that personality is ingrained and can’t be changed,” said Dr. Jennifer Watling Neal, associate professor of psychology and co-investigator on the study.

“This is important because some personality traits can help children succeed in life, while others can hold them back.”

The study appears online in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Researchers studied two preschool classes for an entire school year, analyzing personality traits and social networks for one class of three year-olds and one class of four year-olds .They discovered children whose play partners were extroverted or hard-working became similar to these peers over time.

Children whose play partners were overanxious and easily frustrated, however, did not take on these particular traits.

Researchers said the study is the first to examine these personality traits in young children over time.

Dr. Emily Durbin, study co-investigator and associate professor of psychology, said kids are having a bigger effect on each other than people may realize.

“Parents spend a lot of their time trying to teach their child to be patient, to be a good listener, not to be impulsive,” Durbin said.

“But this wasn’t their parents or their teachers affecting them — it was their friends. It turns out that four and four year-olds are being change agents.”

Michigan State University doctoral students Allison Gornik and Sharon Lo co-authored the study.

Source: Michigan State University