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.

Keywords: amygdala; cortisol; decision making; empathy; functional MRI; hypothalamus; mothers; social neuroscience.

Figure 1

A complete trial in the Parenting Decision Making Task is depicted here. The events labels (underscored) were not presented on the screen during the task. Words in brackets referred to a picture of a child. Words in quotation were the texts presented during the task.

Figure 2

Brain regions with Negative > Positive Feedback differential response that were associated distinct dimensions of dispositional empathy measured with IRI. Referring to Table 3 for the coordinates, number of voxels, Z-score, and p-values. The clusters in the statistical brain map were presented at p = 0.005, uncorrected, with the color map in T-scores.

Figure 3

The VACC was differentially activated by the Positive > Negative Feedback. The scatter plot depicted the mean parameter estimate of the VACC cluster on the Y-axis and the cortisol reactivity (dCORT) on the X-axis. The cluster in the statistical brain map was presented at p = 0.005, uncorrected, with the color map in T-scores.

Figure 4

The functional connectivity between the hypothalamus-septal area during the Negative Feedback was inversely correlated with the cortisol reactivity (dCORT). The cluster in the statistical brain map was presented at p = 0.005, uncorrected, with the color map in T-scores.