ArticleFrontiers in neuroscience2014
Empathy and stress related neural responses in maternal decision making.
Article in Frontiers in neuroscience, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 50 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
50 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Impact of Subdomains of Affective and Cognitive Empathy on Burnout Syndrome in Nurses: A Meta-Analysis.International nursing review · 2026Pooled it
- Functional neuroimaging of the human lateral septum: a systematic review of behavioral correlates and anatomical localization.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Pooled it
- The neuroscience of social feelings: mechanisms of adaptive social functioning.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2021Pooled it
- A Modified Trier Social Stress Test for Vulnerable Mexican American Adolescents.Journal of visualized experiments : JoVE · 2017Pooled it
- Postpartum adversity in rats creates a hypervigilant maternal state through selective salience-circuit recruitment.Neurobiology of stress · 2026Article
- Self-oriented affective empathy is associated with increased negative affect.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- It Takes Three: Parental Hostility, Brain Morphology, and Child Externalizing Problems in a Parent-Offspring Neuroimaging Trio Design.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Path of intuitive compassion to transform conflicts into enduring peace and prosperity: Symmetry across domains of reiterated prisoner's dilemma, dyadic active inference, and Mahayana Buddhism.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Empathy for others versus for one's child: Associations with mothers' brain activation during a social cognitive task and with their toddlers' functioning.Developmental psychobiology · 2022Article
- Stronger brain activation for own baby but similar activation toward babies of own and different ethnicities in parents living in a multicultural environment.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Functional Neuroimaging of Human Hypothalamus in Socioemotional Behavior: A Systematic Review.Brain sciences · 2022Review
- Epigenetic Clock Deceleration and Maternal Reproductive Efforts: Associations With Increasing Gray Matter Volume of the Precuneus.Frontiers in genetics · 2022Article
- Recent Neuroscience Advances in Human Parenting.Advances in neurobiology · 2022Article
- Emotional and Cognitive Empathy in Caregivers of Persons with Neurodegenerative Disease: Relationships with Caregiver Mental Health.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2021Article
- Neurobiology of peripartum mental illness.Handbook of clinical neurology · 2021Review
- Reduced Child-Oriented Face Mirroring Brain Responses in Mothers With Opioid Use Disorder: An Exploratory Study.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- How stress can influence brain adaptations to motherhood.Frontiers in neuroendocrinology · 2021Review
- Maternal Neurobiological Processing of Negative Adolescent Stimuli: Relations With Positive Parenting and Relationship Quality.Journal of research on adolescence : the official journal of the Society for Research on Adolescence · 2020Article
- Compassion As an Intervention to Attune to Universal Suffering of Self and Others in Conflicts: A Translational Framework.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Imaging stress: an overview of stress induction methods in the MR scanner.Journal of neural transmission (Vienna, Austria : 1996) · 2019Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.