Moms can pass emotion down to their daughters

Like mother, like daughter - Even the science says so as a new study has revealed that the brain structure governing emotion is passed down from a mother to her daughter.

The study of 35 families led by a UC San Francisco psychiatric researcher showed for the first time that the structure of the brain circuitry known as the corticolimbic system is more likely to be passed down from mothers to daughters than from mothers to sons or from fathers to children of either gender. The corticolimbic system governs emotional regulation and processing and plays a role in mood disorders, including depression.

A large body of human clinical research indicates a strong association in depression between mothers and daughters, while many previous animal studies have shown that female offspring are more likely than males to show changes in emotion-associated brain structures in response to maternal prenatal stress. Until now, however, there have been few studies that attempted to link the two streams of research, said lead author Fumiko Hoeft.

The finding does not mean that mothers are necessarily responsible for their daughters' depression, Hoeft said. Many factors play a role in depression - genes that are not inherited from the mother, social environment, and life experiences, to name only three. Mother-daughter transmission is just one piece of it.

Hoeft noted that the study opens the door to a whole new avenue of research looking at intergenerational transmission patterns in the human brain."

The study is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.