Dopamine Helps Moms Bond with Babies

Guest: Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, Professor of Psychology, Northeastern University, author of “How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain” When a mother and her baby are really bonded, they do this thing called “synchrony” where they mirror each other’s facial expressions and sounds back and forth in sync. Well our next guest wanted to know if that bond was playing out on a neurochemical level in the mom’s brain, too. The results of that research recently appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science and provide the first evidence that dopamine – the neurotransmitter involved in the brain’s reward center – is also central to human bonding.