Our mums have been there for everything from watching us take our first steps to helping us transition into womanhood and motherhood ourselves. And even though they’ve endured a few angsty teenage door-slams, the bond between mother and daughter stands the test of time.
In fact, scientists say it’s the strongest.
In a study done to figure out why depression and other mood disorders seem to be commonly passed on from mums to their girls, scientists performed MRI scans on 35 healthy families and found that mother and daughter have similar anatomy when it comes to the part of the brain that regulates emotions.
‘This association was significantly greater than mother–son, father–daughter, and father–son associations,’ said researchers in The Journal of Neuroscience. This means that women are more likely to understand and relate to the emotions of their mothers than anyone else, and vice versa. The next time you’re having a rough day, you might want to call up the one who (probably!) best understands what you’re going through.
And if you’ve ever felt like you’re turning into your mother, you now have science backing you up.
‘We joke about inheriting stubbornness or organisation—but we’ve never actually seen that in human brain networks before,”‘ lead author Fumiko Hoeft from University of California tells Scientific American. ‘[This research] was a proof of impact.’
