You are like a mirror reflection of your mother" and "Considering how handsome your father is, I can see where you got your looks from," we more often than not come across these phrases. While its a known fact that genetics play a role in this connection, a recent study has shown that heredity also has a say in this, and it's quite a significant one. A new study has shown that the depressive symptoms and various other characteristic traits found in a woman is most likely passed on to from her mother

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A group of researchers from the University of California, San Francisco has discovered that the corticolimbic system of the brain, which helps in regulating our emotions and is related to the revelation of depressive symptoms in a person - is most likely to be passed on to a daughter from the mother rather than mother to the son or father to the offspring.

he study was conducted on 35 'healthy' families by lead author Fumiko Hoeft, who is also the associate professor at the University of California, and her team. They gathered MRI brain scans of all the members in each family where none of them had a history of depression or had been diagnosed with it, and analyzed their voxels (small units of volume) in the corticolimbic system

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They found a prominent connection between the gray matter volume in the corticolimbic system of a mother-daughter duo than any other parent-offspring pairing

Hoeft said that the study showed thatgenetics are more complicated than expected. She added : "We joke about inheriting stubbornness or organization—but we’ve never actually seen that in human brain networks before. [This research] was a proof of impact, of using a new design that has significant potential.