142 Chapter 5 child, empathy can encompass empathic concern and perspective taking with respect to both positive and negative emotions (Lenzi et al., 2009; Perry et al., 2011). As this was a new task that needed to be validated, and negative events are expected to be more salient (see Perry et al. (2011)), we focused on negative events in the present study. Future studies would benefit, however, from considering both the positive and negative components of empathy. CONCLUSION The present study demonstrates the engagement of unique brain responses to the imagined suffering of parents’ own child versus an unfamiliar child in the cognitive empathy network, but not in the affective empathy network. It suggests that parents more strongly engage in perspective taking when imagining their own child suffering, as compared to the suffering of an unfamiliar child. In contrast, the lack of activation in the affective empathy network between their own child and an unfamiliar child suggests that at the level of the brain parents seem not to vicariously experience or “feel” the emotions of the own child to a greater extent than the emotions of an unfamiliar child when imagining their suffering, although they did subjectively report higher levels of affective distress towards their own child versus an unfamiliar child. In addition, parental care did not co-vary with activity in the empathy networks, but parents who were perceived as less caring exhibited increased activity in anterior and lateral prefrontal brain regions when imagining their own child suffering. These results provide new insights into neural processes supporting parental empathy, highlighting the importance of regions in the cognitive empathy network when being confronted with the suffering of their own child, and suggest that additional (e.g., emotion regulation) networks may be relevant for parental empathic behavior in daily life. Moreover, the present study provides a foundation for studying parental neural responses to imagined suffering of parents’ own child in parents of children with (a history of) prolonged physical (e.g., chronic pain) or mental (e.g., adolescent anxiety or depression) suffering.
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