Empathy for others versus for one's child: Associations with mothers' brain activation during a social cognitive task and with their toddlers' functioning.

ABSTRACT: Caregivers who are higher in dispositional empathy tend to have children with better developmental outcomes; however, few studies have considered the role of child-directed (i.e., "parental") empathy, which may be relevant for the caregiver-child relationship. We hypothesized that mothers' parental empathy during their child's infancy will be a stronger predictor of their child's social-emotional functioning as a toddler than will mothers' dispositional empathy. We further explored whether parental and dispositional empathy have shared or distinct patterns of neural activation during a social-cognitive movie-watching task. In 118 mother-infant dyads, greater parental empathy assessed when infants were 6 months old was associated with more social-emotional competencies and fewer problems in

SUBMITTER: Ojha A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9608359 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature