Empathy and stress related neural responses in maternal decision making

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.

Natural variation in maternal sensitivity is reflected in maternal brain responses to infant stimuli.

“…This is consistent with previous findings using baby cry and visual stimuli (Atzil et al, 2012;Ho et al, 2014;Kim et al, 2011;Phelps, 2004;Swain et al, 2008;Wittfoth-Schardt et al, 2012). …”

“…Women may use their close relationships with others in a different way to men: women may regulate their perception and responses to stress through the development of close affiliative bonds (Ho et al, 2014;Marazziti et al, 2006). In this way, plasma OT may be secreted in some women particularly under what they perceive to be stressful situations in order specifically to prompt a desire for affiliation (Taylor et al, 2006).…”

Right Frontoinsular Cortex and Subcortical Activity to Infant Cry Is Associated with Maternal Mental State Talk

“…Severity of postpartum depression was assessed on the 10-item Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS; Cox et al, 1987) with reports of depressed mood, anhedonia, guilt, anxiety, and suicidal ideation experienced in the past 7 d rated on four-point scales (0 -3). An EPDS score above 12 indicates "probable" depression (Gibson et al, 2009). Mothers were considered to be breastfeeding if at least 80% of the infant's nutrition was delivered via breast milk.…”

Empathy, Components of Empathy and Curricular Evaluation of the Faculty of Dentistry, Evangelical University of El Salvador

“…This result is consistent with the "empathic decline" model, which is manifested by a decline in empathy values from the third year, preceded by an increase between the first and third years [15,16. ] This distribution has tried to be explained by attributing this decline to different factors: stress [18,19], and academic load 20, among others. However, there are studies that have observed that such decline has not been found in students of dentistry and medicine [1,3,6,13,14,21], which suggests that "decline" could be a particular case of different models of the behavior of empathy through the years [14].…”