Article summary with White matter integrity moderates the relation between experienced childhood maltreatment and fathers’ behavioral response to infant crying by Alyousefi-van Dijk et al. - 2021

How can a fathers’ response to infant crying be related to his own childhood maltreatment?

For a father who has experienced childhood maltreatment, hearing his infant cry may trigger memories of child abuse and neglect and cause feelings like aversion, anxiety, or anger. Their experience of childhood maltreatment is known to be associated with emotional dysregulation throughout later life, and so the fathers may not be effectively managing these emotions that arise when hearing his infant cry. Adults who experienced more childhood maltreatment show more negative behavioral responses to child signals and respond with harsher reactions when they are exposed to infant crying.

What is a handgrip dynamometer?

A handgrip dynamometer is an evaluation tool that’s used to measure isometric grip force, or hand grip strength. It is used in parenting research as a behavioral marker of the ability to modulate a behavioral response while being exposed to infant crying. With regards to infant crying, more excessive handgrip force is seen in women with insecure attachment representations, maltreating mothers, and men and women with experiences of childhood maltreatment.

Why is it interesting to look at white matter fibers when studying childhood maltreatment and parental response to infant crying?

Experiencing childhood maltreatment affects the brain’s white matter structure. Atypical brain structure associated with childhood maltreatment has been found to mediate detrimental functional outcomes like psychopathology and vulnerability to stress. It is possible that the association between experienced maltreatment and fathers’ response to infant crying is mediated by the brain’s white matter structure. Also, brain structure may play a moderating role leaving fathers more or less susceptible to cognitive and emotional dysfunction after experiencing maltreatment.

What is the relation between childhood maltreatment experiences, handgrip force in reaction to infant crying, and white matter tract integrity in fathers?

The study done by Alyousefi-van Dijk et al. (2021) showed the following results:

• Childhood maltreatment experiences were related to paternal behavioral responses.
• Fathers with higher levels of experienced maltreatment used more excessive handgrip force while listening to infant crying.
• Whole-brain analysis revealed no significant relation between reported maltreatment and white matter integrity, meaning that white matter integrity did not mediate the relation between maltreatment and handgrip force.
• Childhood maltreatment experiences were only predictive of handgrip force during infant cry exposure in fathers with low levels of white matter integrity in the bilateral uncinate fasciculus.

What are possible explanations for fathers’ experiences of childhood maltreatment predicting more handgrip force in response to infant crying?

It is possible that maltreated fathers experience more aversion and anxiety when presented with negative infant signals and are therefore more likely to respond harshly. This could be the result of emotional dysregulation or deficient inhibitory control. Also, childhood maltreatment is known to be related to an attentional bias toward negative or threatening stimuli. This bias could be an adaptive mechanism preparing the person for frequent exposure to threatening situations. Finally, neural hyperactivation in regions involved in threat-detection in response to various emotional facial expressions points to a mechanism of interpreting emotional expressions as potentially dangerous in maltreated people.