1 13 General introduction which a child can explore the (social) world around them (Feldman, 2017; Schore, 2013). As such, the parent-child attachment bond is a foundation for future relationships into adulthood (e.g., romantic relationships, friendships) and a starting point for the development of a child’s social competences (Pratt et al., 2017). NEURAL SYSTEMS OF ATTACHMENT AND AFFILIATIVE BONDING Studies on neural signatures of the parent-child bond seem to agree on an “attachment network” in the brain (Abraham et al., 2018; Atzil et al., 2011; Barrett et al., 2012; Elmadih et al., 2016; Feldman, 2017; Kuo et al., 2012; Leibenluft et al., 2004; Lenzi et al., 2009; Shimon-Raz et al., 2021; Swain et al., 2014; Wan et al., 2014). In response to the sight of one’s own child (versus an unfamiliar child) parents typically show increased activation in neural networks supporting complex social functions that are important for parental caregiving, such as resonating with other’s mental states and emotions in the anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex, inferior frontal gyrus, inferior parietal lobule, and supplementary motor area (i.e., embodied simulation network, including the affective empathy network) and social cognition, mental-state understanding, and social goal interpretation in the medial prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junction, temporal pole, posterior cingulate gyrus, superior temporal sulcus (i.e., mentalizing network, including the cognitive empathy network) (Feldman, 2017). See Figure 1.2 for a schematic overview of this “attachment network”. Moreover, these brain regions have been consistently linked to subjective (self-report) and objective (behavioral observations) measures of parental caregiving and parentchild bonding. It is of note, however, that the lion’s share of these studies has been conducted in parents of infants and young children. Interestingly though, a recent study has found that these attachment-related patterns of activation were independent of a child’s age, representing a parent’s and child’s attachment relationship throughout life from infancy to adulthood (UlmerYaniv et al., 2021). Less is known about neural signatures of socio-emotional connectedness between a parent and a child during adolescence. This thesis therefore investigated neural signatures of two meaningful processes common within the parent-child relationship during adolescence: Socio-emotional connectedness of parents and adolescents when making eye contact with each other and parental empathic responses during the imagined suffering of their child.
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