It is almost impossible to describe what a father or mother feels when they see a son smile.
A study by the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston (United States) comes to give a scientific explanation to the emotion we experience when we see the smile of our baby.
According to the researchers, Your baby's smile activates the mother's brain reward center like an addictive drug would.. It's funny, because according to that comparison, a child's smile could be considered a necessity.
They analyzed the brain response of 28 first-time mothers of children between 5 and 10 months by looking at photos of their babies and other babies in three attitudes: smiling, sad and with a neutral expression.
They measured the blood flow of the mothers' brains and noticed that when the mothers saw the faces of their own babies, the central areas of the brain associated with the reward were activated.
The strength of the reaction depended on the baby's facial expression. The stimulated areas were activated with greater intensity when seeing the faces of their own children smiling and with less intensity when seeing the sad or neutral faces.
Here comes the relationship with additive drugs. Scientists indicate that those areas of the brain are associated with the neurotransmitter dopamine and are the same as those that have been activated with other experiments linked to drug addiction.
They specified that it is the ventral tegmental area and the regions of the black substance, the striatum, and the frontal lobe regions, which are involved in the processing of emotion, cognition and the outputs of motor and behavioral information.
We could say that seeing the smiling face of a child could be compared to drugs because of the high they both produce. No wonder that the smile of our own children activates the part of the brain associated with the reward, because seeing them happy is precisely one of the greatest rewards parents have in their lives.
