194 Chapter 7 examined parents’ responses to infants or young children instead of to children in the adolescent age range. Although there are currently no studies that directly examined whether parents of young children and adolescents show distinct neural responses to parental empathy, this might have given rise to diverging outcomes. In addition to the cognitive empathy network, enhanced neural activity in bilateral IFG, left precuneus, right inferior temporal gyrus, right fusiform gyrus, left middle/inferior occipital gyrus, right superior frontal gyrus and middle frontal gyrus was found to the imagined suffering of their own child versus an unfamiliar child. Part of these brain regions (precuneus, fusiform gyrus, and middle/inferior occipital gyrus) overlap with brain regions that were found in the eye contact task in response to the sight of parents’ own child compared to unknown others (see Figure 7.3). Amongst other processes, these regions are involved in emotion regulation and might be specifically involved when parents are presented with faces of their own child, which was the case in both tasks. Opposed to the expectation that parents’ self-reported distress or neural responses in the cognitive and affective empathy networks would be linked to the child’s perception of parental care, no evidence was found for such relationships. Although this seems to suggest that parents’ empathic responses do not act as a marker of the parent-child bond, the lack of covariation between these measures may have other (methodological) explanations. One explanation is that the lack of association may be due to differences in time frames about which perceived parental care (i.e., first 16 years of adolescents’ lives) and parental empathic responses in the task (i.e., snapshot of current situation) are assessed. Another explanation is that parents’ responses to the suffering of their child are independent of the quality of the parent-child bond, similar to the study of Lee et al. (2017), and instead have a more “unconditional” character. Our findings have broadened our knowledge about parental empathic responses to imagining, instead of directly experiencing, the suffering of one’s adolescent child. Parents more strongly engage in thecognitive empathy network when imagining their own child suffering compared to an unfamiliar child, while they did not differ in their neural responses in the affective empathy network towards their own child versus an unknown child. It is of note that this study focused on the average levels of parental empathic responses, overlooking individual differences between parents. In addition, the vast majority of studies on empathy are dedicated to the positive effects of parental empathy, e.g., more attuned parenting and better socio-emotional development of the child, however, providing parental empathy can also come with psychological and physiological costs for parents (e.g., empathic distress and inflammation) (Manczak et al., 2016), which has been less extensively studied. A situation in which this might be particularly relevant is when a child has chronic mental or physical problems. Being confronted with the suffering of one’s child might chronically induce empathic distress in these parents. As a consequence, parents
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