7 193 Summary and general discussion the videos. Future studies should examine whether this holds true for real life interactions as this could potentially result in different outcomes, including more discomfort in response to eye contact leading to a greater avoidance. PARENTAL RESPONSES TO THE IMAGINED SUFFERING OF THEIR CHILD Another way of connecting with one’s child is by empathizing with their feelings, especially when adversity crosses their path, which often occurs during adolescence. Chapter 5 therefore examined neural and affective signatures of parental empathic responses to the imagined suffering of their own adolescent child versus an unfamiliar child. In line with the hypotheses, parents reported higher levels of self-reported distress when imagining the suffering of their own child relative to an unknown child. Accordingly, they showed enhanced BOLD-activation within the cognitive empathy network (i.e., TPJ, dmPFC, vmPFC) in favor of their own child that is linked to perspective taking. This increased engagement of the cognitive empathy network might be related to the fact that parents are better able to imagine how their own versus another child would feel in a certain situation as they collected a vast amount of social knowledge about the child’s responses in equivalent situations in the past. Interestingly, the brain regions involved in the cognitive empathy network show extensive overlap with neural signatures of such autobiographical memory processes. Although the task elicited enhanced BOLD-responses in the affective empathy network (i.e., anterior insula, AI; anterior mid-cingulate cortex, aMCC), parents’ neural responses in these brain regions did not differ between the imagined suffering of their own child versus an unfamiliar child. This was not in line with our hypothesis and diverges from what was found in other studies on parents’ empathic responses, who did report enhanced activation in the AI and aMCC to the sight of one’s own versus an unfamiliar child (Abraham et al., 2018; Atzil et al., 2011; Barrett et al., 2012; Elmadih et al., 2016; Kuo et al., 2012; Leibenluft et al., 2004; Lenzi et al., 2009; Wan et al., 2014). Although this finding was unexpected, there are several methodological differences with other studies that might explain the diverging outcomes. First, the parental empathy task that was used outlined a more negative context compared to most of neuroimaging studies that assessed parents’ neural responses to pictures of their own child versus an unknown child instead of being confronted with their suffering. As such, parents might have felt empathically concerned for both perspectives, but were better able to take the perspective of their own child versus an unknown child. In line with this, parents were asked to imagine, instead of directly experiencing, their child’s suffering, which might have placed higher demands on cognitive rather than affective empathic abilities of parents. Lastly, most studies on parental empathy
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