"Abstract from the paper: Multiple lines of research indicate that fathers often treat boys and girls differently in ways that impactchild outcomes. The complex picture that has emerged, however, is obscured by methodologicalchallenges inherent to the study of parental caregiving, and no studies to date have examined thepossibility that gender differences in observed real-world paternal behavior are related to differentialpaternal brain responses to male and female children. Here we compare fathers of daughters and fathersof sons in terms of naturalistically observed everyday caregiving behavior and neural responses to childpicture stimuli. Compared with fathers of sons, fathers of daughters were more attentively engaged withtheir daughters, sang more to their daughters, used more analytical language and language related tosadness and the body with their daughters, and had a stronger neural response to their daughter’s happyfacial expressions in areas of the brain important for reward and emotion regulation (medial and lateralorbitofrontal cortex [OFC]). In contrast, fathers of sons engaged in more rough and tumble play (RTP),used more achievement language with their sons, and had a stronger neural response to their son’s neutralfacial expressions in the medial OFC (mOFC). Whereas the mOFC response to happy faces wasnegatively related to RTP, the mOFC response to neutral faces was positively related to RTP, specificallyfor fathers of boys. These results indicate that real-world paternal behavior and brain function differ asa function of child gender."
