184 Chapter 7 The goal of this thesis was to generate insights into the neural and affective signatures of the socio-emotional connection between parents and adolescents. This was operationalized by the assessment of two key processes in parent-child interactions: Eye contact and empathy. In addition to parents’ and adolescents’ responses to these processes in well-functioning families, two inter-individual characteristics were examined that may interfere with parents’ and adolescents’ ability to engage in meaningful interactions with each other, which were a history of childhood emotional maltreatment in parents and adolescent depression. Studying this provides insight into mechanisms involved in the maintenance of the parent-child bond during adolescence and contributes to potential ways to modify and repair this relationship in situations in which it got disrupted. In this chapter, the findings of the studies are summarized and discussed within the framework of the socio-emotional connection between parents and adolescents in well-functioning families and families with a parent with a history of childhood emotional maltreatment or a depressed adolescent. First, the main findings of each chapter are summarized and this summary is accompanied by a schematic overview of the neural signatures of connectedness between parents and adolescents (see Figure 7.1). Thereafter, parents’ and adolescents’ responses to eye contact, parental empathic responses to the imagined suffering of their child, and eye contact as an index of empathy are discussed in more detail, including overlap and differences in neural responses between parents and adolescents and in parents’ responses to their own child between the two fMRI tasks. The final sections of this chapter are dedicated to general strengths and limitations of the studies and clinical implications followed by directions for future research, and concluding remarks.
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