2 27 Neural and affective responses to prolonged eye contact with one’s own adolescent child and unfamiliar others parent-child relationship is one of the most important factors supporting adolescents’ wellbeing (Steinberg & Silk, 2002), it is of great importance to not only examine parental responses in parents of babies or young infants, but also during adolescence. In addition, adolescents start to become more autonomous in their relationship with their parents and eye contact might substitute physical contact between a parent and child that is more pronounced during infancy and may be less appreciated during adolescence (Montemayor, 1983; Montemayor, 1986; Steinberg & Silk, 2002). All study measures, hypotheses, and analyses were preregistered at Open Science Framework prior to data analyses (https://osf.io/54nky/). Based on prior studies on parent-child bonding (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), we expected that parents report a better mood and enhanced feelings of connectedness after making eye contact with others (compared to an averted gaze). We also expected that differences in mood and feelings of connectedness between direct and averted gaze were most pronounced in response to videos of the own child versus an unfamiliar child or adult. At the neural level, we expected that parents generally show increased neural responses in the subcortical and cortical pathway of face processing in response to direct versus averted gaze. We hypothesized that parents would show enhanced responses in neural networks supporting social cognition, such as theory of mind (i.e., MPFC, TPJ) and salience processing (i.e., insula, ACC, amygdala) in response to videos of their own child versus an unfamiliar child or adult. Based on prior work of Leibenluft et al. (2004), we expected enhanced responses at the neural, but not at the affective level, to an unfamiliar child versus adult. Lastly, we explored an interaction between gaze direction (i.e., direct versus averted gaze) and target person (i.e., with whom parents made eye contact) to examine whether a direct gaze facilitates parents’ responses to their own child versus others. We expected that parents would gaze more towards the eyes of targets during direct versus averted gaze videos. Given that no studies have examined whether gazing to the eyes of others is modulated by personal familiarity or interpersonal closeness (i.e., own child versus unfamiliar targets), we formulated no concrete hypotheses regarding this question. METHOD Participants Data were collected in the context of the RE-PAIR study: “Relations and Emotions in ParentAdolescent Interaction Research”. The RE-PAIR study uses a multi-method approach to examine the relation between parent-child interactions and adolescent depression by comparing families with an adolescent with a current diagnosis of a major depressive disorder (MDD) or dysthymia to families with an adolescent without psychopathology. Families were included in the study if the
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