5 119 Neural signatures of parental empathic responses to imagined suffering of their adolescent child INTRODUCTION One of the most fundamental and evolutionary conserved functions of empathy is its role in parental care. Empathy can be defined as the capacity to share an emotional state with another individual, assess the reasons for the other’s state, and identify with the other, adopting his or her perspective (De Waal & Preston, 2017). Empathy facilitates caregivers to perceive and appropriately respond to physiological and emotional cues from their offspring, such as hunger, pain or distress, and serves as an innate parental protection system (De Waal, 2008). As social lives became increasingly complex across human evolution, caregiving behavior also evolved and became more complex too. Moreover, throughout parenthood, human caregivers’ role slowly transitions from mainly protecting offspring from potential physical threat into preparing them for successfully navigating their complex social worlds (Abraham et al., 2018; Swain et al., 2014). Empathetic parents provide more sensitive and attuned care for their children resulting in healthy parent-child relationships (Kochanska, 1997) and socio-emotional development of children (Abraham et al., 2018; Manczak et al., 2016; Richaud et al., 2013; Soenens et al., 2007). Although several studies focused on neural processes supporting parental sensitivity and attachment to the own child in parents of babies and young children (Abraham et al., 2018; Atzil et al., 2011; Barrett et al., 2012; Elmadih et al., 2016; Kuo et al., 2012; Leibenluft et al., 2004; Lenzi et al., 2009; Wan et al., 2014), only a hand full of neuroimaging studies on this topic have been performed in parents of adolescents (Kerr et al., 2020; Turpyn et al., 2020). Moreover, so far, no prior studies have investigated the neural processes of imagined suffering of one’s own child and how these neural responses relate to sensitive caregiving behavior in parents of adolescents in daily life. Therefore, this study examined the affective and neural responses to one’s own adolescent child when confronted with unpleasant situations and whether these responses are related to parental care as perceived by the adolescent child in daily life. During adolescence, parent-child dyads find themselves in a complex emotional landscape, and although not in every family, increases in the frequency and intensity of conflicts are more likely in this period than in others (Arnett, 1999; De Goede et al., 2009; Restifo & Bögels, 2009; Shanahan et al., 2007). Adolescents start to behave more autonomously in their relationships with their parents, and show higher levels of affect lability and irritability (Steinberg & Silk, 2002). Parents, in turn, need to adapt to these changes and need to find a new balance between being sensitive and responsive to the changing needs and emotional states of the child, while also giving appropriate guidance and support their child’s ability to make autonomous decisions (Kobak et al., 2017). However, achieving such a new balance might be easier to accomplish for some parents than for others (Allen et al., 1998), as adolescence entails many new challenges for the child which are not always easy for parents to imagine or understand, let alone to empathize with. In addition, as a consequence of increasing autonomy of the child during adolescence and the fact that they spend more time without adult supervision, parents often find themselves
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