Helena Rutherford

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Yale University

The experience of human parenthood is near ubiquitous and can profoundly alter one’s body, mind, and environment. However, we know very little about the long-term neural effects of parenthood for parents themselves, or the implications of pregnancy and caregiving experience on the aging adult brain. Here, we investigate the link between the number...

We examined associations between mothers’ (N = 137; 77.7% White/non-Hispanic) neural responding implicated in facial encoding (N170) and attention (P300) to infant emotional expressions and direct observations of their caregiving behaviors toward their 6-month-old infants. We also explored the moderating role of mother-reported and observer-rated i...

A history of psychologically traumatic experiences can impact health outcomes for pregnant people and their infants. The perception and prevalence of traumatic experiences during pregnancy may differ by geographical region. To better understand trends in how and what kinds of psychological trauma are assessed globally, we conducted a secondary anal...

Whilst the field of maternal cognition is gaining interest, with a recent increase in publications, there are still only a handful of existing studies. This presents a unique opportunity for reflection and growth, advancing scientific rigor to ensure that future interpretations of maternal cognitive functioning are based on robust, generalizable da...

Purpose Pregnant women are particularly vulnerable to experiencing mental health difficulties, especially anxiety. Anxiety in pregnancy can be characterized as having two components: general symptomology experienced in the general population, and pregnancy-related anxiety more focused on pregnancy, delivery, and the future child. In addition, women...

The experience of parenthood can profoundly alter ones body, mind, and environment, yet we know little about the long-term associations between parenthood and brain function and aging in adulthood. Here, we investigate the link between number of children parented (parity) and age on brain function in 19,964 females and 17,607 males from the UK Biob...

Tobacco use continues to be a prevalent behavior among many mothers and fathers throughout pregnancy and the postpartum period. The current review provides a framework for understanding parental tobacco smoking during a critical period of child development and its potential impact on postpartum caregiving. It is well documented that maternal illici...

Maternal psychological factors, including anxiety, depression, and substance use, may negatively affect parenting. Previous works with mothers have often assessed each of these factors in isolation despite their frequent co‐occurrence. Psychological factors have also been associated with neural processing of facial stimuli, specifically the amplitu...

Emotion Regulation and Parenting provides a state-of-the-art account of research conducted on emotion regulation in parenting. After describing the conceptual foundations of parenthood and emotion regulation, the book reviews the influence of parents' emotion regulation on parenting, how and to what extent emotion regulation influences child develo...

Pregnancy is a time of dynamic physiological and psychological changes that prepare the maternal milieu for fetal development and consequently prepare women for motherhood. Psychological changes may include beginning to identify as a mother and establishing feelings of increasing emotional investment and preoccupation with the unborn child.1 While...

Human and nonhuman primate mother–infant dyads engage in face‐to‐face interactions critical for optimal infant development. In semi‐free‐ranging rhesus macaques ( Macaca mulatta ), maternal primiparity and infant sex influence the expression of nonverbal face‐to‐face mother–infant interactions. However, whether similar patterns of variation exist i...

Background: Research suggests a link between stress and depression, especially in high-risk groups. The perinatal period is known as a time of increased risk for depression and pregnancy has been associated with alterations in cortisol levels; however, limited research has assessed cortisol reactivity during pregnancy. Finally, no studies have yet...

During pregnancy and the postpartum period, changes in brain volume and in motivational, sensory, cognitive, and emotional processes have been described. However, to date, longitudinal modifications of brain function have been understudied. To explore regional cortical coupling, in pregnancy and at 3 months postpartum, we analyzed resting-state ele...

Nancy Suchman's work highlighted the fundamental role of maternal mentalization in maternal addiction, mental health, and caregiving challenges. In this study, we aimed to examine the role of mental-state language (MSL) as a measure of mentalization in prenatal and postnatal narratives and their sentiment in a sample of 91 primarily White mothers f...

Profound environmental, hormonal, and neurobiological changes mark the transition to motherhood as a major biosocial life event. Despite the ubiquity of motherhood, the enduring impact of caregiving on cognition and the brain across the lifespan is not well characterized and represents a unique window of opportunity to investigate human neural and...

Postpartum substance use can have lasting impacts on caregiving and child development. Prior work examining maternal substance use and neural responses to infant cues has employed unknown infant face and cry stimuli, categorizing mothers as either substance-using or not, potentially overlooking the complexity and dynamic nature of current substance...

Racial disparities in maternal health are alarming and persistent. Use of electroencephalography (EEG) and event-related potentials (ERPs) to understand the maternal brain can improve our knowledge of maternal health by providing insight into mechanisms underlying maternal well-being, including implications for child development. However, systemati...

Maternal substance use is associated with altered neural activity and poor offspring outcomes, which may be facilitated by suboptimal caregiving in the form of impaired parental reflective functioning (PRF). To investigate these associations, the resting-state frontal electroencephalography (EEG) power of 48 substance-using mothers and 37 non-subst...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to determine if baseline frailty was an independent predictor of extended hospital length of stay (LOS), nonroutine discharge, and in-hospital mortality after evacuation of an acute traumatic subdural hematomas (SDH). METHODS A retrospective cohort study was performed. All adult patients who underwent surgery fo...

Intimate partner violence (IPV) among parents impacts their child’s development both directly through exposure to violence and indirectly through disruptions in parenting. In particular, use of IPV may affect how fathers respond to infant crying, including at a neurophysiological level. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether use of IP...

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a demanding caregiving context for parents, particularly during lockdowns. In this study, we examined parental mentalization, parents’ proclivity to consider their own and their child’s mental states, during the pandemic, as manifested in mental-state language (MSL) on parenting social media. Parenting-related posts o...

This paper serves as a call to action for increased focus on emotion regulation during pregnancy. We make this case by summarizing the limited research to date on this topic, which has demonstrated that emotion regulation in pregnant people has important mental health, caregiving, and developmental correlates throughout the perinatal period. Given...

Anxiety symptoms are common among women during pregnancy and the postpartum period, potentially having detrimental effects on both mother and child’s well-being. Perinatal maternal anxiety interferes with a core facet of adaptive caregiving: mothers’ sensitive responsiveness to infant affective communicative ‘cues.’ This review summarizes the curre...

Purpose of Review A growing body of human research has documented associations between the maternal brain and maternal substance use and addictions. This neuroscience-informed approach affords the opportunity to unpack potential neurobiological mechanisms that may underscore challenges in maternal caregiving behavior among mothers with addictions a...

Maternal attachment security is an important predictor of caregiving . However, little is known regarding the neurobiological mechanisms by which attachment influences processing of infant cues, a critical component of caregiving. We examined whether attachment security, measured by the Adult Attachment Interview, might relate to neural responses t...

Neural and psychological processes in pregnancy may be important antecedents for caregiving postpartum. Employing event-related potentials, we examined neural reactivity to infant emotional faces during the third trimester of pregnancy in expectant mothers (n = 38) and expectant fathers (n = 30). Specifically, expectant parents viewed infant distre...

Infant-cue processing facilitates sensitive maternal care, which is necessary in the formation of healthy mother-infant attachment. Mothers may be particularly focused on cue processing early postpartum, contributing to intense preoccupation with their infant’s well-being. Prior reproductive experience, or parity, may also impact the intensity of i...

Maternal responsivity is important to caregiving, reflecting a mother's capacity to initiate prompt behavioural responses to infant's cues, supporting the infant's own regulatory development. There is limited research examining cognitive and affective processes, including working memory and emotion regulation, in the context of maternal responsivit...

Converging evidence demonstrates increased levels of sensitivity to infant faces in mothers. This may be reflective of a series of psychological and neurobiological changes that occur in the transition to, and during early, parenthood for the purpose of appropriate caregiving; however, this enhanced infant facial recognition is in contrast with the...

Maternal anxiety during pregnancy and the early postpartum period is associated with heightened neural processing of neutral infant faces as measured by event-related potentials (ERPs). However, less is known about how anxiety shapes neural face processing in mothers of older children. In our study, 36 mothers of 8-10 year old children completed a...

Humans are innately social creatures and the social environment strongly influences brain development. As such, the human brain is primed for and sensitive to social information even in the absence of explicit task or instruction. In this study, we examined the influence of different levels of interpersonal proximity on resting state brain activity...

Substance use may influence mothers' responsiveness to their infants and negatively impact the parent-infant relationship. Maternal substance use may co-opt neural circuitry involved in caregiving, thus reducing the salience of infant cues and diminishing the sense of reward experienced by caring for infants. Gaps in understanding exist with regard...

Background: Maternal substance use and addiction has been associated with negative consequences for parenting and may increase addiction vulnerability in the developing child. Neuroimaging research suggests that substance use may decrease the reward of caring for infants and heighten stress reactivity to affective infant cues. Methods: Thirty-tw...

Substance use disorders constitute a significant public health problem in North America and worldwide. Specifically, substance addictions in women during pregnancy or in the postpartum period have adverse effects not only on the mother, but also on mother-infant attachment and the child’s subsequent development. Additionally, there is growing evide...

Maternal bonding early postpartum lays an important foundation for child development. Changing brain structure and function during pregnancy and postpartum may underscore maternal bonding. We employed connectome-based predictive modeling (CPM) to measure brain functional connectivity and predict self-reported maternal bonding in mothers at 2 and 8...

Motherhood has been deemed a normal crisis given the significant psychological, biological, and neural changes surrounding pregnancy and the postpartum period. These challenges can become more complex because they are closely related to the parent’s own self-development and sense of self-efficacy grounded in their personality prior to parenthood. T...

Objective: Infant crying can lead to parental frustration and is the most common trigger for abusive head trauma (AHT). We used qualitative methodology with an activating stimulus (an audiotape of an infant crying) to prime the participants to engage in open dialogue for the purpose of understanding their perceptions of infant crying and its assoc...

Purpose of Review Parental brain research primarily employs general linear model–based (GLM-based) analyses to assess blood oxygenation level–dependent responses to infant auditory and visual cues, reporting common responses in shared cortical and subcortical structures. However, this approach does not reveal intermixed neural substrates related to...

Existing evidence indicates that maternal responses to infant distress, specifically more sensitive and less inconsistent/rejecting responses, are associated with lower infant negative affect (NA). However, due to ethical and methodological constraints, most existing studies do not employ methods that guarantee each mother will be observed respondi...

Addiction remains a significant public health concern. Despite numerous public health initiatives, many parents continue to use substances during the prenatal and postpartum period. While stress has been implicated in the maintenance of substance use disorders more generally, we propose that parenting stress specifically increases vulnerability to...

Emotion regulation encapsulates the capability to successfully manage an ongoing emotional experience, particularly in social interactions, and thus may be especially significant to early parent-child relationships. In particular, the capacity to adjust emotions may support parental mentalization and reflective functioning – how parents think about...

It is vital that new mothers quickly and accurately recognize their child’s facial expressions. There is evidence that during pregnancy women develop enhanced processing of facial features associated with infancy and distress, as these cues signal vulnerability and are therefore biologically salient. In this study, 51 pregnant women at 17–36 weeks...

Pregnancy is shaped by unfolding psychological and biological changes in preparation for parenthood. A growing literature has examined the postpartum maternal brain. However, few studies examine the maternal brain during pregnancy, and whether brain function in pregnancy may have implications for postpartum caregiving. Using event-related potential...

Previous studies have shown that the experience of childhood maltreatment can influence recognition and processing of emotional cues and that these effects can extend into adulthood. Such alterations in cognitive processing may have important implications for processing of infant affect and parenting behavior. This study investigated whether the ex...

Prior reproductive experience, or parity, may contribute to differential neural responses to infant stimuli during pregnancy. We examined the P300 elicited by viewing infant and adult faces, as well as houses, in women pregnant with their first child and compared their neural responses to women who had at least one child prior to their current preg...

Background: A significant number of women continue to smoke tobacco during pregnancy despite the increased risk of complications to fetal and infant development. Therefore, effective interventions are needed to assist pregnant women with the process of tobacco cessation. Traditional counseling programs have demonstrated some success; however, nove...

Although substance use and abuse may impact brain and behavior, it is still unclear why some people become addicted while others do not. Neuroscientific theories explain addiction as a series of between- and within-system neuroadaptations that lead to an increasingly dysregulating cycle, affecting reward, motivation, and executive control systems....

Parental reflective functioning (PRF) describes a parent’s capacity for considering both their own and their child’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, which can help parents to guide interactions with children. Given the cognitive demands of keeping infants in mind whilst caregiving, we examined the association between aspects of executive functio...

Tactile interactions are of developmental importance to social and emotional interactions across species. In beginning to understand the affective component of tactile stimulation, research has begun to elucidate the neural mechanisms that underscore slow, affective touch. Here, we extended this emerging body of work and examined whether affective...

Understanding the maternal neural response to infant affective cues has important implications for parent-child relationships. The current study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine patterns in mothers’ responses to infant affective cues, and evaluated the influence of maternal experience, defined by parity (i.e., the number of child...

This study investigated vicarious effort-based decision-making in 50 adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) compared to 32 controls using the Effort Expenditure for Rewards Task. Participants made choices to win money for themselves or for another person. When choosing for themselves, the ASD group exhibited relatively similar patterns of...

Recent research has suggested a role for the hormone oxytocin in social cognition and behavior. Administration of intranasal oxytocin modulates multiple brain regions during experimental tasks; however, the neural mechanisms that underscore the changes associated with oxytocin administration are yet to be fully elucidated. In a double-blind placebo...

Event-related potentials (ERPs) have been widely employed to identify different stages of face processing, with recent research probing the neural dynamics of adult’s processing of infant faces. Infant faces represent a salient category of visual stimuli, especially in parents, likely prioritized for processing through activity of the oxytocinergic...

Maternal addiction constitutes a major public health problem affecting children, with high rates of abuse, neglect, and foster care placement. However, little is known about the ways in which substance addiction alters brain function related to maternal behavior. Prior studies have shown that infant face cues activate similar dopamine-associated br...

Social neuroscience research investigating autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has yielded inconsistent findings, despite ASD being well-characterized by difficulties in social interaction and communication through behavioral observation. In particular, specific etiologies and functional and structural assays of the brain in autism have not been consist...

Psychoanalytic perspectives on parenting and child development have been well articulated in the literature. With advances in neuroimaging methods, recent interest has focused on the neural circuits that may support caregiving in human subjects. In this issue, we consider the value of psychodynamic and neuroscientific perspectives as they pertain t...

Motherhood is a unique transitional period in adulthood accompanied by distinct changes in the mind and brain. Although psychoanalytic and neuroscientific theory employ different levels of abstraction and methodology, there may be value in considering the synergy between the two fields for understanding this critical transitional period for women....

Women are vulnerable to anxiety during pregnancy and postpartum. However, little is known about antenatal anxiety and neural processing of infant-relevant information. In this experiment, the N170, P300, and LPP (late positive potential) event-related potentials were measured from 43 pregnant women as they viewed infant and adult faces, which were...

Addiction remains a significant public health concern that affects multiple generations within families, and in particular the early relationship between parents and their developing child. This article will discuss recent advances in our understanding of the neurobiology of parenting and addiction. Specifically, the discussion will focus on the re...

Objective. Smoking has a detrimental impact on maternal physical health and exposes children to secondhand smoke, but the extent to which it affects maternal brain and behavior is not well-known and may have implications for parent and child development. We examined how current smoking status might relate to maternal neural responses to infant cues...

Recent work has identified links between mothers’ self-regulation and emotion regulation (ER) and children’s social-emotional outcomes. However, associations between maternal ER strategies (e.g., reappraisal, suppression), known to influence internalizing problems in adults, and children’s negative affect (NA) have not been considered. In the curre...

Multiple lines of inquiry, including experimental animal models, have recently converged to suggest that executive functioning (EF) may be one mechanism by which parenting behavior is transmitted across generations. In the current investigation, we empirically test this notion by examining relations between maternal EF and parenting behaviors durin...

The transition to parenthood marks a significant developmental period for the mother. Clinical and preclinical studies evidence neural and hormonal changes that support maternal behavior that is critical to infant survival and development. These changes suggest marked plasticity as a result of reproduction in the mother. Furthermore, multiple repro...

SYNOPSIS Parenting has a significant and lasting impact on child development. From birth, parents must sensitively and appropriately attend to their infant’s emotional expressions and vocalizations. Accumulating evidence indicates that these infant cues of emotion attract more attention than equivalent adult cues in parents as well as non-parents....

Substance addiction may follow a chronic, relapsing course and critically undermine the physical and psychological well-being of the affected individual and the social units of which the individual is a member. Despite the public health burden associated with substance addiction, treatment options remain suboptimal, with relapses often seen. The pr...

Parental reflective functioning refers to the capacity for a parent to understand their own and their infant's mental states, and how these mental states relate to behavior. Higher levels of parental reflective functioning may be associated with greater sensitivity to infant emotional signals in fostering adaptive and responsive caregiving. We inve...

Background: Few prospective studies examine the link between lower heart rate variability (HRV) and depression symptoms in adolescents. A recent animal model specifically links HRV to anhedonia, suggesting a potential translational model for human research. Method: We investigated the association between spectral measures of resting HRV and depr...

Both autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and psychopathy are primarily characterized by social dysfunction; overlapping phenotypic features may reflect altered function in common brain mechanisms. The current study examined the degree to which neural response to social and non-social feedback is modulated by autistic versus psychopathic traits in a samp...

Depression symptoms during pregnancy may affect emerging maternal sensitivity and have lasting consequences for the dyadic relationship. Here we examined whether depression was associated with the neural correlates of infant face and cry perception during pregnancy. In 36 women between 34-38 weeks gestation, we examined the P300 elicited by infant...

Recent work suggests that executive functions, specifically working memory, may facilitate emotion regulation (ER). Here we examined whether measures of visuospatial working memory and verbal working memory relate to ER in a group of recent mothers. We found that while visuospatial working memory was associated with, and predictive of, self-reporte...

Substance use during pregnancy and the postpartum period may have significant implications for both mother and the developing child. However, the neurobiological basis of the impact of substance use on parenting is less well understood. Here, we examined the impact of maternal substance use on cortical gray matter (GM) and white matter (WM) volumes...

We aimed to use electroencephalography (EEG) to examine the neural effects of OT, particularly by looking at slow (SW) and fast (FW) wave correlations which have been shown to represent predispositions to certain behavioral styles. Given that SW oscillations are associated with subcortical motivational/emotional processes whereas FW are correlates...

Parental reflective functioning, referring to the capacity of a parent to consider their child's mental states as they relate to their behavior, may support sensitive and adaptive parenting. We investigated the relationship between parental reflective functioning and tolerance of distress in a sample of recent mothers (N=59). Participants completed...

Neuroscience theory on substance use and parenting converge to suggest that reward motivation is an integral part of substance use initiation and maintenance, and is important in maternal response to infant cues. Using the ERP technique, this study compared substance-using (SU) and non-SU mothers’ feedback related negativity (FRN) neural response t...

Diminished responsivity to reward incentives is a key contributor to the social-communication problems seen in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Social motivation theories suggest that individuals with ASD do not experience social interactions as rewarding, leading to negative consequences for the development of brain circuitry subserving social inf...

Emotion regulation, defined as the capacity to influence one's experience and expression of emotion, is a complex skill now recognized to evolve throughout the lifetime. Here we examine the role of emotion regulation in parenthood, and propose that regulatory function during this period is distinct from the emotion regulation skills acquired and im...

SYNOPSIS Parents play a significant role in their child’s development. Recent neuroimaging research has begun to evaluate the neural circuitry of human parenting to better understand parental responsiveness to infant affective cues. Here, the authors introduce the value of using electroencephalography and event-related potentials as a methodology t...

It has been reported previously that infant faces elicit enhanced attentional allocation compared to adult faces in adult women, particularly when these faces are emotional and when the participants are mothers, as compared to non-mothers [1]. However, it remains unclear whether this increased salience of infant faces as compared to adult faces ext...

Women may be especially vulnerable to anxiety during the postpartum period and early infancy. However, little is known regarding the potential impact of maternal anxiety on the neural processing of infant-relevant information.Methods In this ERP study, 47 recent mothers viewed neutral and distressed infant faces, concurrent with EEG collection. We...

Across species, kin bond together to promote survival. We sought to understand the dyadic effect of exclusion by kin (as opposed to non-kin strangers) on brain activity of the mother and her child and their subjective distress. To this end, we probed mother-child relationships with a computerized ball-toss game Cyberball. When excluded by one anoth...

Donald Winnicott Today. Edited by Jan Abram. East Sussex: Routledge, 2013. Donald Winnicott contributed widely to the field of psychoanalysis, and this book serves to discuss those contributions as well as their influence on analytic thought from a broad perspective of members of the analytic community. One of his leading contributions, which play...

Background: Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have difficulties with interpersonal functioning. Prominent theories suggest this is due to social cues being less salient in individuals with ASD. Social cues can express both positive and negative feedback, therefore are important modifiers of behaviour. Thus, decreased sensitivity to...

Infant facial cues play a critical role in eliciting care and nurturance from an adult caregiver. Using an attentional capture paradigm we investigated attentional processing of adult and infant emotional facial expressions in a sample of mothers (n = 29) and non-mothers (n = 37) to determine whether infant faces were associated with greater task i...

Distress tolerance is defined behaviorally as the ability to maintain goal-directed behavior while experiencing physical or psychological distress. Distress tolerance is closely related to emotion regulation and is a clinically relevant construct contributing to psychopathology across adults and adolescents, yet limited research has examined the de...

Increased impulsivity and risk-taking are common during adolescence and relate importantly to addictive behaviors. However, the extent to which impulsivity and risk-taking relate to brain activations that mediate cognitive processing is not well understood. Here we examined the relationships between impulsivity and risk-taking and the neural correl...

Table S1. Participant Demographics.