2 25 Neural and affective responses to prolonged eye contact with one’s own adolescent child and unfamiliar others INTRODUCTION Humans are hard-wired to connect with others and an important non-verbal strategy to form and maintain strong social ties with other humans is by making eye contact (Emery, 2000; Hietanen, 2018; Kellerman et al., 1989). Receiving a direct gaze induces positive feelings and signals social inclusion, which fulfills our intrinsic need to belong, and to be literally ‘seen’ (Hietanen et al., 2018; Hietanen et al., 2020; Kiilavuori et al., 2021; Kleinke, 1986). Eye contact constitutes one of the first acts of reciprocity between a parent and a child (Robson, 1967), and is thought to be an important facilitator for a strong parent-child bond and secure attachment. Moreover, positive affective responses of parents to eye contact with their own child are thought to reinforce sensitive caregiving behavior (Robson, 1967). To date, we know remarkably little about what exactly happens in the parental brain when parents make eye contact with their child. Nor do we know whether these responses are unique to the parent-child context or generalize to eye contact with unfamiliar others. A better understanding of the role of eye contact in social interaction might generate new insights for those having difficulties connecting with others via eye contact on a social and emotional level, both within and outside the parent-child context, and pave the way for interventions. Therefore, we examined neural and affective processes in parents when they make prolonged eye contact with their own child. We contrast personalized videos of their own child against videos of an unfamiliar child or adult and employed a multimethod approach including self-reports of affect, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and eye tracking. It is known that people show specific (neural) response to faces of personally familiar compared to unfamiliar others (Petrowski et al., 2019; Ramon & Gobbini, 2018; Taylor et al., 2009), and such studies have often been conducted within the parent-child context (Abraham et al., 2018; Atzil et al., 2011; Barrett et al., 2012; Elmadih et al., 2016; Kuo et al., 2012; Lenzi et al., 2009; Wan et al., 2014). In response to the sight of their own child (versus unfamiliar children) parents typically show increased activation in neural networks supporting complex social functions that are important for parental caregiving, such as theory of mind, empathy, and interpersonal closeness/attachment (i.e., medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), temporal parietal junction (TPJ), anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex, amygdala, and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) (Abraham et al., 2018; Atzil et al., 2011; Shimon-Raz et al., 2021). Moreover, these brain regions have been consistently linked to parental caregiving and attachment to the child and activations were independent of a child’s age, representing one’s attachment relationship throughout life from infancy to adulthood (Shimon-Raz et al., 2021; Ulmer-Yaniv et al., 2021). In addition to neuroimaging studies on the processing of faces as a whole, there is a vast amount of research on neural responses to direct (versus averted) gaze of unfamiliar individuals. These studies have broadly distinguished two networks: A subcortical pathway (i.e., superior colliculi/periaqueductal grey, pulvinar nuclei and amygdala) for a ‘quick and dirty’ detection of
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