190 Chapter 7 in the same task the neural responses of their adolescent child did dependent on the quality of the bond they experienced with their parent (Lee et al., 2017). This indicates that parents’ and adolescents’ neural responses to the sight of each other are not identical and emphasize the fact that the perspectives of parents towards their adolescent child and adolescents towards their parent are intrinsically different. Lastly, adolescents showed enhanced neural activity in the right superior temporal gyrus (STG) during eye contact with their parent, while this region was not activated in parents while making eye contact with their child. The STG has been linked to social cognition and seems to be an important hub for the integration of multisensory information regarding social situations, including the representation of eye gaze direction (Adolphs, 2003; Hoffman & Haxby, 2000). This finding corroborates with a study on the neural representations of eye gaze and identity of targets, in which Hoffman and Haxby (2000) showed that the STG was specifically linked to selective attention to gaze direction, while other regions were related to attending to the targets’ identity. As such, this suggests that adolescents may be more sensitive to the direction of others’ gaze as compared to adults. Figure 7.2 Overview of overlap (orange) between parents (red) and adolescents (green) for the main effect of target (i.e., own child/parent versus an unfamiliar child/adult) in various brain regions. The figure includes F-maps of the 4 × 2 ANOVA in SPM of parents (n = 79) and non-depressed adolescents (n = 59). dlPFC = Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, TPJ = Temporoparietal junction.
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