Mothers are more egocentric towards their own child’s bodily feelings

Abstract

Our emotional state can influence how we understand other people’s emotions, leading to biases in social understanding. Yet emotional egocentric biases in specific relationships such as parent-child dyads, where not only understanding but also emotional and bodily regulation is key, remain relatively unexplored. To investigate these biases and control for sensory priors, we first conducted two experiments in dyads of adult strangers (total N = 75) using a bodily Emotional Egocentricity Task that enables simultaneous affective tactile stimulation within a dyad. We showed its effectiveness in eliciting both classical and sensory-controlled egocentric biases. We then recruited 68 mother-child dyads and found that mothers exhibit higher classical and sensory-controlled emotional egocentric biases towards their own child compared to an unfamiliar child. Results suggest that mothers tend to rely on their bodily feelings more when judging the states of their own child than those of other children, possibly consistent with their regulatory parental role.