Abstract
Mothers need to make caregiving decisions to meet the needs of children, which may or may not result in positive child feedback. Variations in caregivers' emotional reactivity to unpleasant child-feedback may be partially explained by their dispositional empathy levels. Furthermore, empathic response to the child's unpleasant feedback likely helps mothers to regulate their own stress. We investigated the relationship between maternal dispositional empathy, stress reactivity, and neural correlates of child feedback to caregiving decisions. In Part 1 of the study, 33 female participants were recruited to undergo a lab-based mild stressor, the Social Evaluation Test (SET), and then in Part 2 of the study, a subset of the participants, 14 mothers, performed a Parenting Decision Making Task (PDMT) in an fMRI setting. Four dimensions of dispositional empathy based on the Interpersonal Reactivity Index were measured in all participants—Personal Distress, Empathic Concern, Perspective Taking, and Fantasy. Overall, we found that the Personal Distress and Perspective Taking were associated with greater and lesser cortisol reactivity, respectively. The four types of empathy were distinctly associated with the negative (vs. positive) child feedback activation in the brain. Personal Distress was associated with amygdala and hypothalamus activation, Empathic Concern with the left ventral striatum, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), and supplemental motor area (SMA) activation, and Fantasy with the septal area, right SMA and VLPFC activation. Interestingly, hypothalamus-septal coupling during the negative feedback condition was associated with less PDMT-related cortisol reactivity. The roles of distinct forms of dispositional empathy in neural and stress responses are discussed.
Highlights
Parents make numerous daily choices regarding how to best care for their children
PART 1 Pre-Social Evaluation Test (SET) cortisol levels were at 0.19 mcg/dL (SE = 0.019) and post-SET levels were at 0.18 mcg/dL (SE = 0.16), controlling for between-subject variables of maternity status, prior social interaction condition, age, and time of cortisol collection
To examine the relationship between the SET-related change in cortisol and the four dimensions of dispositional empathy (i.e., Personal Distress, PD; Empathic Concern, EC; Perspective Taking, PT; and Fantasy, FS), partial correlations among these variables were computed, controlling for age, binary coding for the time of cortisol measurement, maternal status, and the randomly assigned pre-SET condition
Summary
Parents make numerous daily choices regarding how to best care for their children. Parents must make quick decisions and learn from their child’s feedback to guide their course of action. Children may not always provide predictable, desirable feedback to guide parental responses. Responses that were effective at one time may not be effective at another time, leaving children upset or in need. Such unpredictable negative feedback may augment frustration in both parents and children and undermine a healthy parent-child relationship in the long run, highlighting the need for high parental sensitivity and attunement (Feldman et al, 2004; Swain et al, 2014). Research finds that people differ in their dispositional empathy in response to other people’s distressing experiences. It is not surprising that empathy is critical to sensitive parenting (Feshbach, 1990; Davidov and Grusec, 2006; Landry et al, 2006; Psychogiou et al, 2008)
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