Parental Behavior and Hormones in Mammals

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Abstract

Mammalian maternal behavior is under hormonal control. Female mammals are primed by the estrogen of late pregnancy to be sensitive to subsequent inputs, ranging from the vaginal–cervical stimulation of parturition, to the chemical and auditory characteristics of the neonates. Other steroid hormones, peptide hormones, and reward/reinforcement neural circuit modifications, also make important contributions to the timing and activation of specific components involved in appropriately timing, and directing, maternal care. Mammalian fathers, on the other hand, still have to ensure that they do not injure their offspring but rarely make the same behavioral transition to the provision of direct care that mothers make. Nevertheless, those males that do become behavioral fathers challenge our understanding of how the brain forms strong social bonds and have much to offer as animal models of the role of hormones in that process.

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    2019, Midwifery
    Citation Excerpt :

    As part of this shift to hospital, immediately after birth, newborns were removed from their mothers and taken to the nursery where they were cared for and returned to their mothers every four hours for feeding. Routine separation of newborns and their mothers at birth represented a huge departure from the hormonally-mediated way human and other mammals have evolved to interact with, protect and care for their babies from birth (Serperoa et al., 2013; Wynne-Edwards and Weil, 2019). While the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative and its’ Ten Steps for Successful Breastfeeding have gone some way to redress this practice; remnants of this routine separation still exist in hospitals today (World Health Organization and UNICEF, 2018).

Dr. Katherine E. Wynne-Edwards completed her PhD at Princeton University and postdoctoral training at the University of Kansas Medical Center. She was a professor in the Biology Department at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, for 18  years, and recently moved from there to the newly founded Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Calgary in Alberta. She has broad interests in animal behavior ranging from field work with hamsters in Siberia, through the manipulation of hormones in an animal model of exceptional paternal behavior, to the studies of hormone evolution. Her new laboratory is exploiting the power of high-throughput mass spectrometry to explore the diversity of steroid hormone dynamics within individual animals, with a focus on communication between a mother and her fetus, and how lifestyle risk factors for chronic disease are encoded in hormone dynamics.

Dr. Zachary M. Weil completed his PhD at Ohio State University and postdoctoral training at Rockefeller University. He is an assistant professor at Ohio State University Medical Center in the Department of Neuroscience. His interests include neuroendocrine regulation of behavior with a particular emphasis on the responses to traumatic brain injuries that occur during development.

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