7 199 Summary and general discussion depression (Thew et al., 2017). If these negative cognitions can be addressed by letting those who suffer from negative self-views gaze into their own eyes, and create a state of mind that facilitates modification of these self-views, this potentially alleviates the negative feelings and fosters more positive feelings. Lastly, the results of the study in Chapter 6 suggest a possible link between eye contact and signaling one’s empathetic feelings to others. Given that eye contact is important in signaling parents’ emotional availability and engagement with their child, but also of (mental) health practitioners with their patients, being distracted by e.g., smartphone or computer use might hamper this way of connecting with each other. In parents, it might diminish their opportunity to show emotional availability to their adolescent child. In adolescents, it might hamper letting their parents comfort them and give emotional support when needed. Both examples show that it would be helpful to inform parents and adolescents about the importance of literally keeping an eye on each other or checking in on each other’s emotional state via eye contact. In addition, (mental) health professionals might also benefit from expressing their empathy to their patients via eye contact, especially when a patient is sharing sensitive content that demands an empathetic response. Making eye contact might help them to express that they understand where their patient is going through,. Patients, in turn, feel better understood and supported, which might positively affect the patient-practitioner relationship, potentially benefitting treatment response. FUTURE DIRECTIONS An empirical question that is raised is whether the neural networks that were found in response to the sight of one’s own child or parent are unique to the parent-child bond or generalize to other affiliative connections, e.g., romantic couples, close friends, siblings. It is possible, for example, that how people respond to seeing another person might not be driven by the type of affiliative relationship, but rather by the quality of this bond. To answer this question, it is necessary to perform functional MRI studies involving these distinct types of affiliative bonds, preferably with a within-subject design, using stimuli including one’s own child, one’s sibling, one’s best friend, and one’s partner. This would allow for a direct comparison between these affiliative bonds and whether such accompanied neural response patterns generalize on an inter- and intra-individual level. Additional self-reported assessments of the bonds could give insight into individual differences in how subjectively close people feel with these persons in their daily life. Another, more applied, clinical avenue of further research and the next step in our line of research, is to examine how parenting a depressed adolescent (or other mental illness) and
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