7 195 Summary and general discussion might suppress their own emotional and physiological needs to be (emotionally) available for their child, which might eventually lead to psychological and physiological ailments. Therefore, we will focus on these inter-individual differences between parents in a follow-up study as well as on how they relate to the well-being of their child in the context of depressed adolescents. Figure 7.3 Overview of overlap between region of interest (ROI) and whole-brain results of the parental empathy task and the whole-brain results of the eye contact task in parents for the own child > unfamiliar child contrast. TPJ = Temporoparietal junction. EYE CONTACT AS AN INDEX OF EMPATHY Besides the role of eye contact in connecting with others on a socio-emotional level it might also be a way to infer others’ feelings. Chapter 6 therefore examined to what extend the eyes of others are used to collect social information that contributes to infer others’ feelings, also referred to as empathic accuracy. It is of note that, in contrast to the other studies, this chapter was not focused on the parent-child bond, but on the assessment of empathic accuracy in adults in general. In contrast to the hypotheses, there was no evidence that gazing into the eyes of others helped parents to be more empathically accurate about others’ feelings. This suggests that, at least in the empathic accuracy task that was used, parents did not significantly rely on social cues
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