(Image source from: Study finds)

According to research, mother passing emotions to daughters can also pass on depression. The brain part controlling our feelings is likely to be passed down to female offspring from mother, rather than to sons or from fathers to children of any of the gender.

The research marks the first evidence to linking of depression to a part of brain is hereditary. A study was conducted on 35 families. The structure of the brain circuitry known as the corticolimbic system was looked at. The system controls emotional regulation and processing. It also plays a major role in mood disorders like depression.

Earlier studies identified strong link between mothers and daughters in depression. Lead author of the study, doctor Fumiko Hoeft, said that findings do not mean that mothers are responsible for depression in daughters.

Dr 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. But this is the first study to bridge animal and human clinical research and show a possible matrilineal transmission of human corticolimbic circuitry, which has been implicated in depression, by scanning both parents and offspring. It opens the door to a whole new avenue of research looking at intergenerational trans mission patterns in the human brain."

The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Dr Hoeft said, "This gives us a potential new tool to better understand depression and other neuropsychiatric conditions, as most conditions seem to show intergenerational transmission patterns. Anxiety, autism, addition, schizophrenia, dyslexia, you name it -brain patterns inherited from both mothers and fathers have an impact on just about all of them."

-Sumana