Prenatal music influences maternal and offspring behavior
Y. TAKANO1, S. YANAGITA2, 3, N. KUBOTA3, T. MATSUZAWA1, K. TAKEDA3; 1 Dept. of Pharmaceut. Sci., 2 Dept. of Sci. and Technol., 3 Res. Inst. for Sci. and Technol., Tokyo Univ. of Sci., Chiba, Japan
Music has overarching influences in human life. Music often attenuates anxiety and improves learning ability, and has been widely used as an additional tool for medical treatment. Recently, as with that many pregnant women play music for their babies in utero, effects of prenatal music on offspring represent one of fascinating topics. Furthermore, music is believed to be a more effective tool for fetal development since the prenatal period shows high sensitivity to environmental situations. Although some previous studies have shown the relationship between prenatal music and developmental changes, it remained unclear about the influence on various behaviors in both dam and offspring. In this study, we investigated the effects of prenatal music on offspring behavior with a focus on emotional behavior. We also examined the effects of prenatal music on maternal behavior which is an important factor for behavioral development of offspring. Pregnant Wistar/ST rats were exposed to music environment during the late gestational period while control dams were exposed to a similar decibel ambient noise. Then, we observed maternal behavior, i.e., licking and mother off pups. Offspring at 6 weeks old, we measured emotional behavior using open field test (OFT), elevated plus maze (EPM), and forced swim test (FST). Music exposed dam showed significant increase in the time of licking and decrease the time spent away from their pups. In the offspring, prenatal music environment showed significant increase in the immobility time of FST, but not significant differences in anxiety-like behavior in OFT and EPM. Therefore, these results indicated that prenatal music influenced maternal and offspring behavior, suggesting that prenatal music might affect brain region related to maternal behavior in the dam and emotional behavior, especially depression-like behavior in the offspring.