A baby’s smile not only lights up a mother’slife - it is also the right tonic that gives her a natural high, a new study has revealed.
Researchers have carried out the study and found that the sight of a smiling infant stimulates the ’feel-good’ part of the mother’s brain which deals with sensations of reward and pleasure too. "These are the areas that have been activated in other experiments associated with the neurotransmitter dopamine. It may be that seeing your baby’s smiling face is like a naturalhigh," lead researcher Lane Strathearn said.
Dopamine is a key chemical messenger in the body, important for motivating, sleeping and controlling movement. For the study, the researchers put 28 first-time moms of babies, aged between five and ten months, into a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scanner, British newspaper ’The Daily Telegraph’ reported.
The participants were then asked to look at pictures of their own and other babies. In some of the pictures, the children were seen smiling and in others they had sad or neutral expressions.
When the mothers looked at the faces, the machine showed the flow of blood in their brains and revealed the regions that were the most active at any time
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