Our study thus elucidates the common and distinct means by which mothers and fathers engage with their children, especially during play, lending support for theories postulating partial differentiation of paternal and maternal neural 🧠 parenting systems. /end

Overall, exclusion yielded comparable neural activation 🧠 in mothers and fathers associated with mentalising 🤔, saliency ⚠️, and emotion-processing 😊. However, there were also several interesting parental gender differences during inclusion & exclusion. 3/n

We used a novel event-related fMRI adaptation of the "Cyberball" virtual ball-tossing paradigm ⚾🫴 in 48 fathers and 40 mothers of pre-school children to look at parental brain responses 🧠 during parent-child play with inclusion, exclusion and re-inclusion phases. 2/n