Neuromatch Conference
Talk: Is motherhood a moderator of empathy for pain? An fMRI study
Speaker: Irene Sophia Plank, Humboldt University of Berlin (grid.7468.d)
Title: Is motherhood a moderator of empathy for pain? An fMRI study
Emcee: Alberto Antonietti
Backend host: Gelana Tostaeva
Details: https://neuromatch.io/abstract?submission_id=recrrVSYizj5cAvsN
Presented during Neuromatch Conference 3.0, Oct 26-30, 2020.
Summary: Social competencies such as empathy and understanding others’ minds are vital for parents towards successful parenting. They not only allow adequate reactions to a child’s needs but since parents are important role models, they are also passed on to the children (Kluczniok et al. 2016). To date, little is known about the modulating effect of motherhood on social understanding and specifically on the understanding of a child’s mind versus an adult’s mind. In this study, we used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to investigate empathy for pain in mothers and women without children. Our task used both adult and children as protagonists in the stimulus material. Women were recruited that were either i) mothers of one child between 4 and 10 years old (corresponding to the age of the children in the stimulus material), or ii) had no children and also did not interact with them on a regular basis. Univariate analyses of our neuroimaging data show significant differences between the conditions empathy with a child versus empathy with an adult in the left SMG. Additionally, mothers and women without children show significantly different activation patterns with stronger activation in the bilateral anterior insula when asked to imagine people in painful scenarios while viewing pictures showing these scenarios. This hints at differences in strategies in reacting to people in painful situations with mothers recruiting more strongly those areas traditionally related to empathy. Successful classification based on both motherhood and protagonist of the stimuli strengthens these findings.
