Parenting and empathy capabilities drive brain response to pain cues in baby cries

The ability of human caregivers to decode and respond to the distress information encoded in a baby's cries is essential for the baby's survival. What are the factors that influence this aptitude, and how is this represented in the brain? Although previous neuroimaging studies have shown that hearing cries activates a set of brain areas that drive caregiver response behaviors, they have mainly focused on adults with parenting experience, especially mothers, and have not explored how the level of pain expressed in the cry modulates caregiver brain activation. In this study, we combine fMRI studies on a large sample of parents and nonparents with ground-breaking voice resynthesis tools enabling us to systematically control the level of pain expressed by babies' cries. We show that pain cries induce more specialized brain activation in parents than in nonparents, with greater connectivity within and between networks involved in mentalizing, emotional regulation, and vigilance. Mothers show higher overall connectome activity than fathers. Yet, it is among parents with the greatest emotional empathy-both fathers and mothers-that vocal roughness (a marker of distress in baby cries) most actively recruits the parental vigilance brain network. By taking advantage of acoustic resynthesis, which allows precise control over sound stimuli, and by paying attention to the ability to understand the emotions of others rather than focusing solely on sex, our study highlights that parental status interacts with empathetic capabilities to modulate how the brains of human adults respond when a baby's cry signals distress.