ArticleDevelopmental cognitive neuroscience2019
Chronic trauma impairs the neural basis of empathy in mothers: Relations to parenting and children's empathic abilities.
Article in Developmental cognitive neuroscience, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 35 citations in OpenAlex.
- Mediators of the Association Between a Parent's Experience of Trauma and Their Children's Well-Being: A Systematic Review.Trauma, violence & abuse · 2026Pooled it
- Parent-Child Synchrony After Early Childhood: A Systematic Review.Clinical child and family psychology review · 2022Pooled it
- Neural Correlates of Maternal Posttraumatic Stress in the First Postpartum Year: Blunted Salience and Prefrontal Responses to Infant Distress.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2026Article
- Parent and Child Influences on Adrenocortical Synchrony During Middle Childhood.Developmental psychobiology · 2025Article
- "I remember most of my family seeing it": The presence of others during child physical abuse, as conveyed in forensic interviews with Israeli children.Family process · 2025Article
- Stress-induced cortisol response predicts empathy for pain: The role of task-based connectivity between the insula and sensorimotor cortex during acute stress.Neurobiology of stress · 2024Article
- Neural correlates of altered emotional responsivity to infant stimuli in mothers who use substances.Journal of psychiatric research · 2024Article
- Parent-child interactive behavior in a German sample of parents with and without a mental illness: model replication and adaption of the Coding Interactive Behavior system.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
- Neural shifts in alpha rhythm's dual functioning during empathy maturation.Brain and behavior · 2023Article
- Neural shifts in alpha rhythm's dual functioning during empathy.Brain and behavior · 2021Article
- The integration of social and neural synchrony: a case for ecologically valid research using MEG neuroimaging.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Review
- Rhythmic Neural Patterns During Empathy to Vicarious Pain: Beyond the Affective-Cognitive Empathy Dichotomy.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Article
- How stress can influence brain adaptations to motherhood.Frontiers in neuroendocrinology · 2021Review
- Associations between stress exposure and new mothers' brain responses to infant cry sounds.NeuroImage · 2020Article
- What is resilience: an affiliative neuroscience approach.World psychiatry : official journal of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) · 2020Article
- Cumulative Risk on Oxytocin-Pathway Genes Impairs Default Mode Network Connectivity in Trauma-Exposed Youth.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2020Article
- Synchronous Interactions Foster Empathy.Journal of experimental neuroscience · 2019Article
- The Neural Basis of Empathy and Empathic Behavior in the Context of Chronic Trauma.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Early life stress carries long-term negative consequences for children's well-being and maturation of the social brain. Here, we utilize a unique cohort to test its effects on mothers' social brain, targeting mothers' neural empathic response in relation to caregiving and child empathic abilities. Mother-child dyads living in a zone of repeated war-related trauma were followed from early childhood and mother-child behavioral synchrony was repeatedly observed. At pre-adolescence(11-13 years) children's empathic abilities were assessed and mothers(N = 88, N = 44 war-exposed) underwent magnetoencephalography(MEG) while exposed to vicarious pain. All mothers showed alpha suppression in sensorimotor regions, indicating automatic response to others' pain. However, trauma-exposed mothers did not exhibit gamma oscillations in viceromotor cortex, a neural marker of mature empathy which utilizes interoceptive mechanisms for higher-order understanding and does not emerge before adulthood. Mother-child synchrony across the first decade predicted mothers' viceromotor gamma, and both synchrony and maternal viceromotor gamma mediated the relations between war-exposure and child empathic abilities, possibly charting a cross-generational pathway from mothers' mature neural empathy to children's empathic capacities. Our findings are first to probe the maternal social brain in adolescence in relation to parenting and underscore the need for targeted interventions to mothers raising children in contexts of chronic stress.
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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.