Replication Data for: Cohabitation Enhances Couple’s Brain-to-Brain Synchrony to Infant Cry

Cohabitation is a state in which two people occupy a common living space. Cohabiting spouses with children are exposed to the same salient child signals (e.g., cry) and to each other within a shared environment. Past research has shown that child signals uniquely modify patterns of parental brain responses, but no study has so far investigated the role of cohabitation in influencing brain-to-brain coordination between parental dyads in response to child signals. Synchrony refers to the temporal matching of behavioural and physiological patterns of responses between partners. In this study, we measured brain-to-brain synchrony in four clusters of the prefrontal cortical (PFC) of 24 mother-father couples (N = 48) using functional Near-infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS). Couples were exposed to infant cries in two conditions, either together (same room simultaneously) or separately (different room and staggered timing). To obtain an index of synchrony, the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm was applied to the fNIRS data. Couples who cohabited for longer periods of time exhibited greater synchrony in response to cry in the right frontal cluster regardless of whether their partner was present. This brain region maps to the right anterior PFC (BA10), middle frontal gyrus (BA46), and inferior frontal gyrus (BA47) which are responsible for attentional regulation and high-level processing of pain and affective prosody. Our findings suggest that longer duration of shared physical proximity synchronizes brain responses of mother and father pairs in response to salient infant cries. This result highlights the role of cohabitation in assisting coupled co-parenting responses.