1 19 General introduction Another facet of empathic behavior that is of interest to social interactions between people, both within and outside the parent-child bond, is the ability of people to accurately infer others’ feelings, also referred to as empathic accuracy (Ickes & Hodges, 2013; Zaki et al., 2008; Zaki et al., 2009). Several studies have emphasized that the eye region is an important source of social cues that contribute to one’s ability to be empathically accurate about others’ internal state (Baron-Cohen et al., 1997; Buchan et al., 2007; Eisenbarth & Alpers, 2011; Hall et al., 2010; Zaki et al., 2009). However, the lion’s share of these studies included paradigms in which empathic accuracy was assessed in response to static pictures of others, which limits generalizability to real life social situations. A hand full of studies that did make use of close-to-real life dynamic video stimuli found a positive link between people’s trait empathy levels and the amount of eye contact they made with others, especially under emotionally valenced circumstances (Cowan et al., 2014; Martínez-Velázquez et al., 2020). However, these studies did not include whether gazing into the eyes contributes also to being more empathically accurate about others’ feelings. To bridge this gap, we adapted an already existing empathic accuracy task by simultaneously measuring participants gaze using eye tracking. The task includes emotionally valenced target stories, including both visual and verbal (speech) informational cues, closely mimicking real life social settings. As little is known about the role of eye contact in empathic accuracy this study focused on this relationship in adults towards unknown other adults. THE RE-PAIR STUDY The empirical studies in this thesis take place in the context of the RE-PAIR study: “Relations and Emotions in Parent-Adolescent Interaction Research”. This study uses a multi-method and multi-informant approach to examine the relation between parent-adolescent interactions and adolescent well-being by comparing adolescents with a current diagnosis of a major depressive disorder (MDD) or dysthymia and their parents to adolescents without psychopathology and their parents (i.e., healthy control families). Moreover, we included both mothers and fathers in the study, which allows for the assessment of potential gender differences in the socioemotional connection between parents and their adolescent child. The RE-PAIR study consists of four parts: An online questionnaire battery, a research day in the lab, two weeks of ecological momentary assessment (EMA), and an MRI scan session in which we focus on concepts relevant for the parent-child relationship during adolescence and adolescent depression (e.g., parental empathy, eye contact, responses to feedback of parents, peers and unfamiliar others, and autobiographical memory processing). See Figure 1.3 for an overview of the RE-PAIR study and the specific parts used to answer the research questions in the present thesis.
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