It takes a village: A multi-brain approach to studying multigenerational family communication.
Dev Cogn Neurosci
; 65: 101330, 2024 Feb.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-38091864
ABSTRACT
Grandparents play a critical role in child rearing across the globe. Yet, there is a shortage of neurobiological research examining the relationship between grandparents and their grandchildren. We employ multi-brain neurocomputational models to simulate how changes in neurophysiological processes in both development and healthy aging affect multigenerational inter-brain coupling - a neural marker that has been linked to a range of socio-emotional and cognitive outcomes. The simulations suggest that grandparent-child interactions may be paired with higher inter-brain coupling than parent-child interactions, raising the possibility that the former may be more advantageous under certain conditions. Critically, this enhancement of inter-brain coupling for grandparent-child interactions is more pronounced in tri-generational interactions that also include a parent, which may speak to findings that grandparent involvement in childrearing is most beneficial if the parent is also an active household member. Together, these findings underscore that a better understanding of the neurobiological basis of cross-generational interactions is vital, and that such knowledge can be helpful in guiding interventions that consider the whole family. We advocate for a community neuroscience approach in developmental social neuroscience to capture the diversity of child-caregiver relationships in real-world settings.
Key words
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Grandparents
/
Extended Family
Limits:
Humans
Language:
En
Journal:
Dev Cogn Neurosci
Year:
2024
Document type:
Article