Abstract
Empathy allows us to share emotions and encourages us to help others. It is especially important in the context of parenting where children’s wellbeing is dependent on their parents’ understanding and fulfilment of their needs. To date, little is known about differences in empathy responses of parents and non-parents. Using stimuli depicting adults and children in pain, this study focuses on the interaction of motherhood and neural responses in areas associated with empathy. Mothers showed higher activation to both adults and children in pain in the bilateral anterior insulae, key regions of empathy for pain. Additionally, mothers more strongly activated the inferior frontal, superior temporal and the medial superior frontal gyrus. Differences between adult and child stimuli were only found in occipital areas in both mothers and non-mothers. Our results suggest a stronger neural response to others in pain in mothers than non-mothers regardless of whether the person is a child or an adult. This could indicate a possible influence of motherhood on overall neural responses to others in pain rather than motherhood specifically shaping child-related responses. Alternatively, stronger responses to others in pain could increase the likelihood for women to be in a relationship and subsequently to have a child.
Highlights
Empathy allows us to share emotions and encourages us to help others
Theories suggest that empathy is an important part of understanding others on an emotional level and part of the affective route of social understanding[2]. It is differentiated from cognitive social understanding which refers to inferential processes to understand other’s emotions and mental states
Parenting by nature forces people to use cognitive and affective social understanding constantly when interacting with their child which could lead to a training effect[20]
Summary
Empathy allows us to share emotions and encourages us to help others. It is especially important in the context of parenting where children’s wellbeing is dependent on their parents’ understanding and fulfilment of their needs. Theories suggest that empathy is an important part of understanding others on an emotional level and part of the affective route of social understanding[2]. In an attentional capture paradigm, infant faces led to slower response times than adult faces in women and this was more pronounced in mothers compared to non-mothers[23] These findings were replicated and extended to pre-adolescent faces in d istress[24]. Research has shown that parenthood can have effects both on a behavioural and on a neural level even when unknown adults or children were the t argets[23,26,27,28,29] It is still unclear whether the influence of parenthood extends to empathy responses and in what way the empathy response in parents and non-parents is different when reacting to children as compared to adults
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