18 Chapter 1 parent-child bonds (Kochanska, 1997), which fosters a child’s socio-emotional development (Abraham et al., 2018; Manczak et al., 2018; Richaud et al., 2013; Soenens et al., 2007). The neural correlates of empathy have been extensively studied and broadly two neural systems can be distinguished. The core of empathic responses is the affective empathy network, including bilateral anterior insula (AI) and anterior mid-cingulate cortex (aMCC) (De Waal & Preston, 2017; Shamay-Tsoory, 2011). This network supports the vicarious experience of affect and thereby facilitates emotion contagion and affect sharing. It may help parents to appropriately “feel” the emotions and needs of their children, which could then promote carrying out adequate caregiving responses needed for sensitive parenting (Abraham et al., 2018; Ainsworth et al., 1978; Fan et al., 2011; Feldman, 2017; Turpyn, 2018). In addition, a more recently evolved cognitive empathy network has been identified that includes regions in temporal, parietal and prefrontal cortex (De Waal, 2008; De Waal & Preston, 2017; Decety, 2011; Decety & Jackson, 2004; Shamay-Tsoory et al., 2009; Zaki & Ochsner, 2012). More specifically, this network includes the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), temporoparietal junction (TPJ), temporal pole, superior temporal sulcus, and frontopolar cortex (Abraham et al., 2018; Feldman, 2017; Shamay-Tsoory, 2011), and facilitates understanding of another’s point of view by making inferences of others’ mental states (Shamay-Tsoory, 2011). In the context of parenting, this cognitive empathy network may promote a better understanding of the feelings, actions, and intentions of the child (Abraham et al., 2018). As parental empathy is, in fact, an important pillar of the attachment bond between a parent and child, it is no surprise that there is extensive overlap between the neural correlates of the affective and cognitive empathy networks and the “attachment network” presented in Figure 1.2. Although parents’ empathic responses towards babies and young children have been studied extensively (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), less is known about these responses when parenting an adolescent child. This is remarkable, as the increasing autonomy of adolescents and more time spend outside adult supervision creates situations where parents are not involved in. When a child, in turn, verbally shares their distress about an unpleasant situation (e.g., being excluded from a peer group) it might be more difficult for parents to imagine how their child would feel and might place higher demands on their sociocognitive capacities needed for an appropriate empathic response. One of the pillars of this thesis was to examine the neural and psychological signatures of parental empathic responses to the imagined suffering of their adolescent child. Moreover, we additionally investigated to what extent inter-individual differences in parental warmth are related to parents’ neural responses to their child’s suffering to examine whether these neural responses can serve as a marker for the parent-child bond.
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