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Despite a recent surge in research examining parent–child neural similarity using fMRI, there remains a need for further investigation into how such similarity may play a role in children's emotional adjustment. Moreover, no prior studies explored the potential contextual factors that may moderate the link between parent–child neural similarity and children's developmental outcomes. In this study, 32 parent–youth dyads (parents:Mage= 43.53 years, 72% female; children:Mage= 11.69 years, 41% female) watched an emotion-evoking animated film while being scanned using fMRI. We first quantified how similarly emotion network interacts with other brain regions in responding to the emotion-evoking film between parents and their children. We then examined how such parent–child neural similarity is associated with children's emotional adjustment, with attention to the moderating role of family cohesion. Results revealed that higher parent–child similarity in functional connectivity pattern during movie viewing was associated with better emotional adjustment, including less negative affect, lower anxiety, and greater ego resilience in youth. Moreover, such associations were significant only among families with higher cohesion, but not among families with lower cohesion. The findings advance our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying how children thrive by being in sync and attuned with their parents, and provide novel empirical evidence that the effects of parent–child concordance at the neural level on children's development are contextually dependent. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTWhat neural processes underlie the attunement between children and their parents that helps children thrive? Using a naturalistic movie-watching fMRI paradigm, we find that greater parent–child similarity in how emotion network interacts with other brain regions during movie viewing is associated with youth's better emotional adjustment including less negative affect, lower anxiety, and greater ego resilience. Interestingly, these associations are only significant among families with higher cohesion, but not among those with lower cohesion. Our findings provide novel evidence that parent–child shared neural processes to emotional situations can confer benefits to children, and underscore the importance of considering specific family contexts in which parent–child neural similarity may be beneficial or detrimental to children's development, highlighting a crucial direction for future research.
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Personality similarity predicts synchronous neural responses in fMRI and EEG data
Abstract Successful communication and cooperation among different members of society depends, in part, on a consistent understanding of the physical and social world. What drives this alignment in perspectives? We present evidence from two neuroimaging studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI;N = 66 with 2145 dyadic comparisons) and electroencephalography (EEG;N = 225 with 25,200 dyadic comparisons) to show that: (1) the extent to which people’s neural responses are synchronized when viewing naturalistic stimuli is related to their personality profiles, and (2) that this effect is stronger than that of similarity in gender, ethnicity and political affiliation. The localization of the fMRI results in combination with the additional eye tracking analyses suggest that the relationship between personality similarity and neural synchrony likely reflects alignment in the interpretation of stimuli and not alignment in overt visual attention. Together, the findings suggest that similarity in psychological dispositions aligns people’s reality via shared interpretations of the external world.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1835239
- PAR ID:
- 10370173
- Publisher / Repository:
- Nature Publishing Group
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Scientific Reports
- Volume:
- 12
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2045-2322
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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