The areas stimulated by the sight of their own babies were those associated with the neurotransmitter dopamine. Specifically, the areas associated included the ventral tegmental area/substantia nigra regions, the striatum, and frontal lobe regions involved in emotion processing, cognition and motor/behavioral outputs.
"These are areas that have been activated in other experiments associated with drug addiction," said Strathearn. "It may be that seeing your own baby's smiling face is like a 'natural high' ".
The strength of the reaction depended on the baby's facial expression, he said.
"The strongest activation was with smiling faces," he said. There was less effect from 
pictures of their babies with sad or neutral expressions.
"We were expecting a different reaction with sad faces," he said. In fact, they found little difference in the reaction of the mothers' brains to their own babies' crying face compared to that of an unknown child.
Overall, the mothers responded much more strongly to their own infants' faces than to those of an unknown baby.
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