Mother knows best: Mothers are more egocentric towards their own child’s bodily emotions

Abstract

Our emotional state can influence how we understand other people’s emotions, leading to biases in social understanding. Yet these biases have not been studied in specific relationships such as parent-child dyads, where not only understanding but also emotional and bodily regulation is key. We first conducted two experiments in adult stranger’s dyads (total N = 75) to validate a novel, bodily Emotional Egocentricity Task (bEET) that allows concurrent affective, tactile stimulation in a dyad. We showed its effectiveness in eliciting emotional and bodily-emotional egocentric biases (EBs). We then recruited 68 mother-child dyads and found that mothers exhibit higher emotional and bodily EB towards their own than an unfamiliar child, but children showed only general, non-mother specific, egocentricity effects. Results suggest that mothers tend to use their bodily feelings more when judging the states of their own child than those of other children, possibly consistent with their regulatory parental role.