Join the Natural Health Society
Benefits Include:-
- Natural Health and Vegetarian Life magazine mailed direct to you each quarter
- Great discounts on books and health products
- Help in improving your health and wellbeing
- Being part of the Natural Health family
Featured Products
Magazine Back Issues
NOW ON SALE!
Set of back issues of Natural Health and Vegetarian Life.
Can’t Lose Weight? You could have Syndrome X
A truly masterful account of how to lose weight, especially valuable for those people who have tried ‘everything’ and their excess refuses to budge.
Healing The Gerson Way - Defeating Cancer and Other Chronic Conditions
An amazing book - virtually a manual for natural health living.
31 Jul 2008A baby's smile is a natural high
Submit a comment
UQ medical graduate and US-based developmental pediatrician, Dr Lane Strathearn, has found a baby’s smile can trigger much more than just a fuzzy feeling for a new mother.
Dr Strathearn, and his team from the Baylor College of Medicine, conducted a study which involved asking 28 first-time mothers to watch photos of their own babies, and other infants, while they were in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner (FMRI).
The findings of the research, which appear in the July edition of Pediatrics, revealed that when a mother sees a photograph of her own child smiling, the reward centres of her brain light up.
Dr Strathearn said the finding could help scientists explain the special mother-infant bond, and how it sometimes goes wrong.
"The relationship between mothers and infants is critical for child development," Dr Strathearn said.
"For whatever reason, in some cases, that relationship doesn’t develop normally.
"Neglect and abuse can result, with devastating effects on a child’s development."
A major finding was that when the mothers saw their own infants’ faces, key areas of the brain associated with reward lit up during the scans.
Interestingly, the areas associated included the ventral tegmental area/substantia nigra regions, the striatum, and frontal lobe regions involved in emotion processing, cognition and motor/behavioral outputs.
"These are areas that have been activated in other experiments associated with drug addiction," Dr Strathearn said.
"It may be that seeing your own baby’s face is like a ’natural high’ . The strongest activation was with smiling faces.
"We were expecting a different reaction with sad faces."
In fact, the researchers noted little difference in the mothers’ brains when they saw their own babies’ crying face compared to that of an unknown child.
"Understanding how a mother responds uniquely to her own infant, when smiling or crying, may be the first step in understanding the neural basis of mother-infant attachment," Dr Strathearn said.
visit news archiveSubmit a comment
Member Login
Natural Health Directory
Find a Natural Health Service In Our Extensive Online Director
Veging Out
Find a Restaurant In Your Area Which Caters To Your Needs
Meet Our Health Director
Roger French
.jpg)
no comments currently avaliable.