196 Chapter 7 conveyed by the eyes. It might be possible that the content-rich stimuli used in the task, including verbal speech, were clear enough to extract the feelings of the target person, making additional social cues from the eye region redundant. Moreover, it might be possible that parents were not fully motivated to accurately infer the feelings of the targets as there was no direct benefit of knowing, especially because the targets were unknown to the parents. Interestingly, there was a positive association between parents’ self-reported levels of empathy and the amount of eye contact they made with others. More specifically, participants who reported to be more empathic (i.e., empathic concern) and find it easier to take others’ perspective (i.e., perspective taking), both on a state (self-report after each trial) or trait (interpersonal reactivity index questionnaire) level, gazed more into the eyes of others when listening to their (positive or negative) emotional story. This is in line with prior studies (Cowan et al., 2014; MartínezVelázquez et al., 2020), and suggests that eye contact might be a way to convey to others that we empathize with their (emotional) circumstances. The idea that eye contact might be a way to signal rather than only receive social cues to others has been previously described by Kobayashi and Hashiya (2011) and was referred to as the gaze grooming hypotheses. This theory is rooted in the notion that humans use eye contact as a contact-free way to groom other humans in order to maintain social bonds. It has been thought to be an evolutionary adaptation that replaced direct grooming behavior that is known from primate species and is useful in maintaining a large number of social bonds, even from a certain distance. As such, our findings support the idea that eye contact might be a way to connect with others and signal: “I see you”. GENERAL STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS The studies in this thesis contribute to our understanding of the neural and affective signatures of connectedness between parents and adolescents and with unknown others. By using several tasks, including developing and validating two novel functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) paradigms, we captured how parents and adolescents connected with each other via eye contact and parental empathy. Our tasks used a personalized design, including videos and photos of participants’ child or parent and of themselves. These stimuli were contrasted with those of unknown others, allowing for the extraction of responses unique to the parentchild context. In addition, contrasting the ‘self’-condition with all ‘other’ conditions enabled us to identify which neural responses were social in nature. Within the tasks, we used a multi-method approach, including subjective reports and functional MRI responses, which not only informed us on how parents and adolescents felt when connecting with each other and unknown others, but gave additional insight on how they respond to each other at the level of the brain. Moreover, the tracking of participants’ gaze during the eye contact task in the MRI scanner informed us on the actual amounts of eye contact participants made and how well they adhered to the
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