5 139 Neural signatures of parental empathic responses to imagined suffering of their adolescent child this might have contributed to a greater involvement of cognitive rather than affective empathy network, although the fact that the cognitive load was the same for all perspectives makes this less likely. Nevertheless, it is of interest for further research to examine parental empathy to imagined suffering using visual stimuli rather than verbal descriptions in order to gain a more detailed insight into the specific processes involved in these parental responses. Although the neural responses of parents to the suffering of their own child involved for the greater part brain regions in “empathy networks”, we also found enhanced activity associated with neural responses to suffering of one’s own child in a set of brain regions (i.e., IFG, MFG and SFG) that we had no hypotheses about. Prior work has implicated these brain regions (e.g., IFG, MFG and SFG) in emotion regulation (Long et al., 2020) and the IFG is a key brain region in the mirror neuron system. In the context of the mirror neuron theory of empathy the IFG has been implicated in automated interoception and internal representation of mental states of others via perceptual-motor coupling, which is directly linked to empathy (Feldman, 2017). Interestingly, these regions have also been found to relate to individual differences in attachment and general sensitivity of parents when they view pictures or video vignettes of their own child (versus an unfamiliar child) (Atzil et al., 2011; Kuo et al., 2012; Riem et al., 2011), suggesting that associations between parenting and neural activity in our task may also be explained by more domain-general neural responses to one’s own child. Regarding individual differences in adolescent-reported parental care and parents’ neural empathic responses to their own child’s suffering we found negative associations between parental care and neural activation in right SFG and left anterior OFG, indicating that lower levels of parental care are related to greater differential neural activation between parents’ own child and the unfamiliar child perspective in these brain regions. These brain regions are part of a prefrontal network consistently found to be important for emotion regulation (Long et al., 2020; Wager et al., 2008). Moreover, these regions overlap with our neural findings at whole-brain level in the present study and show that activation in these brain regions was in general higher in parents while imagining the perspective of the other child versus the own child. These findings were unexpected, particularly because in prior studies a higher emotion regulation activation in, particularly, the prefrontal brain regions are generally related to more adaptive and sensitive parenting behavior (Kuo et al., 2012; Laurent & Ablow, 2012; Michalska et al., 2014; Musser et al., 2012). What is remarkable and what might have contributed to different outcomes is that the majority of these studies presented parents with positive stimuli rather than more negative stimuli that were used in the present study. Although the underlying reason for the enhanced emotion regulation processing is not entirely clear, the results suggest that parental caregiving behavior in daily life might not be (directly) related to neural activation in parental empathy networks, but that additional (e.g., emotion regulation) networks may be relevant for parental empathic behavior in daily life. It is of note, however, that the negative correlation between
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjY0ODMw