120 Chapter 5 in situations in which they rather hear about instead of directly seeing their child suffering (Collins & Russell, 1991; Feldman & Elliott, 1990). Such situations are less common during infancy or childhood and might place higher demands on socio-cognitive capacities needed for empathic responses, such as the ability to imagine complex suffering of an adolescent (e.g., being excluded from a peer group). A better understanding of the neural circuitry supporting cognitive and affective empathy in parents of adolescents might help to elucidate which level of processing is most affected when parental empathy is sub-optimal, and hence should be addressed in particular when designing parenting interventions to facilitate parental empathy during adolescence. Furthermore, appropriate empathic responses of parents are important for the psychological and social adjustment of their child and for a healthy parent-child relationship (Abraham et al., 2018; Kochanska, 1997; Manczak et al., 2016; Richaud et al., 2013; Soenens et al., 2007). Therefore, we examined neural processes in parents supporting empathizing with a range of unpleasant situations an adolescent child may experience. While parental empathy is deemed fundamental for sensitive caregiving (Abraham et al., 2018; Decety, 2011), studies about the neural underpinnings of parental empathic responses are sparse, particularly during adolescence. Elucidating neural correlates of parental empathy during adolescence might yield important insights in whether and how the brain of parents distinguishes between their own child and unfamiliar children in this particular period of transition, and may elucidate which regions are related to sensitive parenting behaviors, such as parental care. Therefore, we developed a novel, ecologically valid task to assess affective and neural parental responses to imagined suffering of their own adolescent child during both physically and socially unpleasant situations, such as their child enduring a physical injury (e.g., a fractured leg) or social adversity (e.g., being humiliated by others). Although the involvement of brain regions in empathic responses in general have been extensively studied, not much is known about how these regions support empathy specifically toward one’s own offspring. Broadly, two neural systems involved in empathy can be distinguished. At the core of empathetic responses in most mammalian species, including humans, there is the affective empathy network, including bilateral anterior insula (AI) and anterior mid-cingulate cortex (aMCC) (De Waal & Preston, 2017; Shamay-Tsoory, 2011). This network supports the vicarious experience of emotions and thereby facilitates emotion contagion and affect sharing. It may help parents to “feel” the emotions and needs of their children, which could then promote carrying out adequate caregiving responses needed for sensitive parenting (Abraham et al., 2018; Ainsworth et al., 1978; Fan et al., 2011; Feldman, 2015; Feldman, 2017; Turpyn, 2018). In addition, a more recently evolved cognitive empathy network has been identified that includes regions in temporal, parietal and prefrontal cortex (De Waal, 2008; De Waal & Preston, 2017; Decety, 2011; Decety & Jackson, 2004; Shamay-Tsoory et al., 2009; Zaki & Ochsner, 2012). More specifically, this network includes dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), ventromedial
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