Integrative Questions

Question 1

What is the role of the amygdala in parenting? Using fMRI, Abraham et al. (2014) found the amygdala was activated when mothers viewed their own infants. This contrasts with the results of Bartels & Zeki (2004) who found that the amygdala was deactivated when mothers viewed their infants. What methodological differences or other factors might account for these different results?

Answer 1

• Amygdala seen as a central node of mammalian mothering in Abraham paper.
• It is not as important as BnST and mPOA which we dont see activated.
  
  • these have connections with amygdala in rodents that receive olfactory information
  • in people - we probably see parts of the amygdala that activate visual processing.
• STS - movement
  
  • correlation with amygdala

It could be the stimulus (picture vs. video) or it could be actually different parts of the amygdala being activated.

Question 2

This part of the prefrontal cortex was activated in the study of Abraham et al. (2014) when parents viewed videos of their interactions with their child and in the experiment in Feng et al. (2014) when men and women experienced cooperation by their partner in the PDG.

This area is the

Answer 2

mPFC

Question 3

A. Compare the doses of OT used by Kosfeld et al. (2005), Andari et al. (2010), and Feng et al. (2014). Why did they choose these doses?

Answer 3

Kosfeld = 24IU
Andari = 24 IU 
Feng = 24 IU

Question 4

The authors speculated that the OT-induced reduction in responsiveness in women may be a result of driving the activity in some part of the network beyond its optimal level, to the downward side of the inverted U. This also suggests that OT dose-response curves may be different for men and women. Some evidence from animal studies is also consistent with the idea of inverted U-shaped dose-response curves for OT. Describe the results of one of the experiments from Sala et al. (2014) that are consistent with this.

Answer 4

they suggest the possibility of an inverted U-shaped dose response function between the brains OT levels and neural activity, that would would already be at the peack of that curve around baseline, and that you would have to administer OT to males for them to reach the same level of activation
conversely, if woman already have max activation (at peak of inverted U curve) then administering more OT would push them beyond the peak of activation, and actually produce deactivation (in comparison to the optimal activation they experienced at baseline) of the caudate/putamen