Socio-emotional information processing during everyday human interactions has been
assumed to translate to social-emotional information processing when parenting a
child. Yet, few studies have examined whether this is indeed the case. This study
aimed to improve on this by connecting the functional neuroimaging data when
seeing socio-emotional interactions that are not parenting specific to observed maternal
sensitivity. The current study considered 45 mothers of small children (12–42 months of
age). It included healthy controls (HC) and mothers with interpersonal violence-related
posttraumatic stress disorder (IPV-PTSD), as well as mothers without PTSD, both
with and without IPV exposure. We found that anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and
ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activity correlated negatively with observed
maternal sensitivity when mothers watched videos of menacing vs. prosocial adult
male–female interactions. This relationship was independent of whether mothers were
HC or had IPV-PTSD. We also found dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) activity to
be correlated negatively with maternal sensitivity when mothers watched any kind of
arousing adult interactions. With regards to ACC and vmPFC activity, we interpret our
results to mean that the ease of general emotional information integration translates
to parenting-specific behavior. Our dlPFC activity findings support the idea that the
efficiency of top-down control of socio-emotional processing in non-parenting specific
contexts may be predictive of parenting behavior.