The role of prenatal stress and maternal trauma responses in predicting children's mental health during war.

The negative effects of prenatal stress on children's development and the buffering effects of maternal behaviour are well documented. However, specific maternal responses to trauma, particularly among families experiencing cumulative stressors during pregnancy and early childhood, remain less understood. This study investigated the interplay between prenatal stress in the context of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and consequent maternal trauma responses and children's difficulties in the context of war-related trauma.

Assessment of pandemic-related pregnancy stress from seven western countries using Rasch analyses.

Introduction: This study examined psychometric properties of the Pandemic-Related Pregnancy Stress Scale (PREPS) using a Rasch Model (RM) in a large sample of pregnant women from Germany, Israel, Italy, Poland, Spain, Switzerland and the United States of America (USA).

Material And Methods: Rasch analyses were used to analyze a sample of 7185 pregnant women who completed the PREPS during the COVID-19 pandemic onset from April to August 2020. Psychological, sociodemographic, and obstetric factors were also collected and analyzed.

Breastfeeding at Any Cost? Adverse Effects of Breastfeeding Pain on Mother-Infant Behavior.

Breast milk is considered the ideal infant nutrition, and medical organizations encourage breastfeeding worldwide. Moreover, breastfeeding is often perceived as a natural and spontaneous socio-biological process and one of the fundamental roles of new mothers. While breastfeeding is beneficial, little scientific consideration has been given to its potential psychological challenges.

Evidence for cultural differences in affect during mother-infant interactions.

Maternal care is considered a universal and even cross-species set of typical behaviors, which are necessary to determine the social development of children. In humans, most research on mother-infant bonding is based on Western cultures and conducted in European and American countries. Thus, it is still unknown which aspects of mother-infant behaviors are universal and which vary with culture.

The impact of sociality and affective valence on brain activation: A meta-analysis.

Thirty years of neuroimaging reveal the set of brain regions consistently associated with pleasant and unpleasant affect in humans-or the neural reference space for valence. Yet some of humans' most potent affective states occur in the context of other humans. Prior work has yet to differentiate how the neural reference space for valence varies as a product of the sociality of affective stimuli.

Common model of stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms in pregnant women from seven high-income Western countries at the COVID-19 pandemic onset.

Objective: Increases in stress, anxiety, and depression among women pregnant during the COVID-19 pandemic have been reported internationally. Yet rigorous comparison of the prevalence of maternal mental health problems across countries is lacking. Moreover, whether stress is a common predictor of maternal mental health during the pandemic across countries is unknown.

Bio-behavioral synchrony is a potential mechanism for mate selection in humans.

The decision with whom to form a romantic bond is of great importance, yet the biological or behavioral mechanisms underlying this selective process in humans are largely unknown. Classic evolutionary theories of mate selection emphasize immediate and static features such as physical appearance and fertility. However, they do not explain how initial attraction temporally unfolds during an interaction, nor account for mutual physiological or behavioral adaptations that take place when two people become attracted.

What Is Social about Autism? The Role of Allostasis-Driven Learning.

Scientific research on neuro-cognitive mechanisms of autism often focuses on circuits that support social functioning. However, autism is a heterogeneous developmental variation in multiple domains, including social communication, but also language, cognition, and sensory-motor control. This suggests that the underlying mechanisms of autism share a domain-general foundation that impacts all of these processes.

Musicality was not selected for, rather humans have a good reason to learn music.

We propose that not social bonding, but rather a different mechanism underlies the development of musicality: being unable to survive alone. The evolutionary constraint of being dependent on other humans for survival provides the ultimate driving force for acquiring human faculties such as sociality and musicality, through mechanisms of learning and neural plasticity. This evolutionary mechanism maximizes adaptation to a dynamic environment.

Women's Depressive Symptoms during the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Role of Pregnancy.

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has multiple ramifications for pregnant women. Untreated depression during pregnancy may have long-term effects on the mother and offspring. Therefore, delineating the effects of pregnancy on the mental health of reproductive-age women is crucial.

Author Correction: Growing a social brain.

In the version of this Perspective originally published, at the end of the first paragraph of the section 'Neural prediction as a potential mechanism for how experience sculpts the developing brain' the citation to ref. 76 should have been to ref. 74, and at the end of the first sentence of the next paragraph ref.

Growing a social brain.

It has long been assumed that social animals, such as humans, are born with a brain system that has evolved to support social affiliation. However, the evidence does not necessarily support this assumption. Alternatively, social animals can be defined as those who cannot survive alone and rely on members from their group to regulate their ongoing physiology (or allostasis).

The impact of affective information on working memory: A pair of meta-analytic reviews of behavioral and neuroimaging evidence.

Everyday life is defined by goal states that are continuously reprioritized based on available, often affective information. To pursue these goals, individuals need to process and maintain goal-relevant information, while ignoring potentially salient information that distracts resources from these goals. Empirically, this ability has typically been operationalized as working memory (WM) capacity.

Bayesian log-Gaussian Cox process regression: with applications to meta-analysis of neuroimaging working memory studies.

Working memory (WM) was one of the first cognitive processes studied with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). With now over 20 years of studies on WM, each study with tiny sample sizes, there is a need for meta-analysis to identify the brain regions consistently activated by WM tasks, and to understand the inter-study variation in those activations. However, current methods in the field cannot fully account for the spatial nature of neuroimaging meta-analysis data or the heterogeneity observed among WM studies.

Bio-behavioral synchrony promotes the development of conceptualized emotions.

As adults, we have structured conceptual representations of our emotions that help us to make sense of and regulate our ongoing affective experience. The ability to use emotion concepts is critical to make predictions about the world and choose appropriate action, such as 'I am afraid, and going to run away' or 'I am hungry and going to eat'. Thus, emotion concepts have an important role in helping us maintain our ongoing physiological balance, or allostasis.

Dopamine in the medial amygdala network mediates human bonding.

Research in humans and nonhuman animals indicates that social affiliation, and particularly maternal bonding, depends on reward circuitry. Although numerous mechanistic studies in rodents demonstrated that maternal bonding depends on striatal dopamine transmission, the neurochemistry supporting maternal behavior in humans has not been described so far. In this study, we tested the role of central dopamine in human bonding.

Functional connectivity dynamics during film viewing reveal common networks for different emotional experiences.

Recent theoretical and empirical work has highlighted the role of domain-general, large-scale brain networks in generating emotional experiences. These networks are hypothesized to process aspects of emotional experiences that are not unique to a specific emotional category (e.g.

The brain basis of social synchrony.

As a social species, humans evolved to detect information from the social behavior of others. Yet, the mechanisms used to evaluate social interactions, the brain networks implicated in such recognition, and whether individual differences in own social behavior determine response to similar behavior in others remain unknown. Here we examined social synchrony as a potentially important mechanism in the evaluation of social behavior and utilized the parenting context, an evolutionarily salient setting of significant consequences for infant survival, to test this issue.

Synchrony and specificity in the maternal and the paternal brain: relations to oxytocin and vasopressin.

Objective: Research on the neurobiology of parenting has defined biobehavioral synchrony, the coordination of biological and behavioral responses between parent and child, as a central process underpinning mammalian bond formation. Bi-parental rearing, typically observed in monogamous species, is similarly thought to draw on mechanisms of mother-father synchrony.

Method: We examined synchrony in mothers' and fathers' brain response to ecologically valid infant cues.

Specifying the neurobiological basis of human attachment: brain, hormones, and behavior in synchronous and intrusive mothers.

The mother-infant bond provides the foundation for the infant's future mental health and adaptation and depends on the provision of species-typical maternal behaviors that are supported by neuroendocrine and motivation-affective neural systems. Animal research has demonstrated that natural variations in patterns of maternal care chart discrete profiles of maternal brain-behavior relationships that uniquely shape the infant's lifetime capacities for stress regulation and social affiliation. Such patterns of maternal care are mediated by the neuropeptide Oxytocin and by stress- and reward-related neural systems.

Immune perturbations in patients along the perioperative period: alterations in cell surface markers and leukocyte subtypes before and after surgery.

Background: Surgery renders patients susceptible to life-threatening complications, including infections, multiple organ failure, and presumably cancer metastases. Surgery-induced immune perturbations were suggested to contribute to such deleterious effects, but also to facilitate post-injury healing. Preoperative psychological and physiological stress responses may contribute to these immune perturbations, and could thus jeopardize patients even before surgery.

Blood transfusion promotes cancer progression: a critical role for aged erythrocytes.

Background: In cancer patients, allogeneic blood transfusion is associated with poorer prognosis, but the independent effect of the transfusion is controversial. Moreover, mediating mechanisms underlying the alleged cancer-promoting effects of blood transfusion are unknown, including the involvement of donors' leukocytes, erythrocytes, and soluble factors.

Method: Two syngeneic tumor models were used in Fischer 344 rats, the MADB106 mammary adenocarcinoma and the CRNK-16 leukemia.

Poly I-C induces early embryo loss in f344 rats: a potential role for NK cells.

Problem: Natural killer (NK) cells were associated with first trimester embryo loss. The current study in the inbred F344 rat assessed the role of NK cells in mediating resorptions caused by poly I-C, a non-specific immunostimulator.

Method Of Study: On fifth day of gestation, rats were injected intraperitoneally with anti-NKR-P1 (1.