7 189 Summary and general discussion to not only arise when making eye contact with one’s parent or child, but also when making eye contact with unknown others. This emphasizes the strong affective component of eye contact, which might find its origin in our intrinsic need to belong to others and to literally be seen. Parents’ and adolescents’ responses to making eye contact with each other In line with our expectations, parents (Chapter 2) and adolescents (Chapter 4) both reported a better mood and enhanced feelings of connectedness in response to the sight of each other compared to unknown others, which is thought to reflect the closeness of their affiliative bond. This is supported by the finding that parents and adolescents did not make more eye contact to the sight of each other compared to unknown others, suggesting that the mood-boosting and connectedness-enhancing impact of prolonged eye contact is rather based on prior social knowledge and prior experiences with one’s parent or child than the direct effects of making eye contact in the task. At the neural level, parents and adolescents showed overlapping patterns of neural activation in response to the sight of each other and unknown others in general. They both activated a set of brain regions including the fusiform gyrus, middle/inferior occipital gyrus, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), TPJ, IFG, middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and cuneus (visualized in Figure 7.2). However, there were also some remarkable differences. Parents exhibited enhanced activation in dmPFC when making eye contact with others (versus themselves), a brain region robustly involved in the mental representation of others (Frith & Frith, 2010), while activity in this region was not found in adolescents in the same contrast. Although this findings was unexpected, it aligns with a recent study showing that the dmPFC undergoes major changes during adolescence related to the development of a consistent representation of self and others and that the specialization of this region continues to refine into young adulthood (van Buuren et al., 2022). Since the adolescents in our sample were aged between 11-17 years, it is possible that the lack of differentiation in the dmPFC when making eye contact with others versus gazing into their own eyes is associated with ongoing maturation processes in this brain region in these adolescents. Another remarkable difference is that whereas parents show profound differences in their neural responses to their own child versus unknown others, adolescents did not show differences in their neural responses to their parent and an unfamiliar peer in the same task. Interestingly, adolescents start to become more autonomous and independent of their parents during adolescence and focus more on peers (Crone & Dahl, 2012). Speculatively, the lack of differences in neural responses in adolescents between the sight of one’s parent and an unfamiliar peer might reflect their interest to engage in social contact with (unknown) peers. Moreover, this dovetails with prior work (Lee et al., 2017) showing an ‘unconditional’ neural response pattern of parents to the imagined suffering of their child that was independent of relationship quality, while
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