5 129 Neural signatures of parental empathic responses to imagined suffering of their adolescent child paced; max = 8000 ms; mean duration = 2321 ms; SD = 1079 ms; range = 640-7896 ms). We included six motion parameters (based on the realignment parameters) to correct for head motion. First, first-level SPM T-contrasts were specified for each condition (self-physical, selfsocial, own child-physical, own child-social, unfamiliar child-physical, unfamiliar child-social). Second, these T-contrast images were entered in a 3 x 2 full factorial ANOVA design with two within-subject factors: ‘Perspective’ (3 levels: Self, own child and unfamiliar child) and ‘stimulus type’ (2 levels: Physical and social). SPM F-maps were computed to assess main effects of ‘perspective’ and ‘stimulus type’, and their interaction, followed up by post-hoc analyses contrasting own child responses versus unfamiliar child responses, self versus own child, and self versus unfamiliar child. To determine neural correlates of parental empathy in brain regions robustly implicated in cognitive and affective empathy, we carried out region of interest (ROI) analyses. We used independently defined functional ROIs (8-mm spheres MNI space) surrounding peak voxels of brain regions consistently found to support affective and cognitive empathy in the extensive meta-analysis of Bzdok et al. (2012), for specific coordinates see Supplement S5.2. We used the MarsBar toolbox (Brett et al., 2002) to extract activity from 8 ROIs, i.e., bilateral AI and aMCC (affective empathy network), and bilateral TPJ, bilateral dmPFC and vmPFC (cognitive empathy network). To assess the effects of ‘perspective’ and ‘stimulus type’ in these ROIs, we performed repeated-measures ANOVAs and post-hoc tests in R. All analyses were Bonferroni corrected for the number of tests (p <.05/8). To explore task-related blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD)-activation in brain regions outside the ROIs, we performed complementary whole-brain analyses. All whole-brain results were corrected for multiple comparisons with Family-Wise Error (FWE) cluster correction at p <.05 (with a cluster-forming threshold of p <.001). To investigate whether parental care as experienced by the adolescent was associated with differential parental neural empathic responses towards their own child we calculated correlations between individual levels of parental care and the difference score in BOLD-responses between the own child and unfamiliar child perspectives within the priori selected ROIs (i.e., bilateral AI, aMCC, bilateral TPJ, bilateral dmPFC and vmPFC). ROI analyses were corrected for comparison across multiple ROIs using Bonferroni corrections (p <.05/8). Lastly, we explored whole-brain associations between parental care and BOLD-responses unique to empathizing with the own child (own child minus unfamiliar child contrast). To check whether results were not driven by differences in handedness, gender of parents, current psychopathology and psychotropic medication status, we performed additional analyses to control for these variables.
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