Empathy in the family: Interbrain synchrony in child-parent sharing of positive emotions

Empathy is central to socio-emotional development, yet the neural mechanisms supporting empathic interaction between parent-child dyads remain largely unexplored. Here, we examined emotional and cognitive empathy using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning in parent-child dyads during a naturalistic emotional sharing task. Parents recounted both a positive-emotion story and a neutral story, after each of which children reported their own empathic experience and parents rated their perception of the child's empathy during the interaction. Behavioral results indicated that emotional empathy ratings were significantly higher compared to neutral sharing, whereas no condition effects were observed for cognitive empathy. Notably, parents attributed higher emotional empathy to their children than children attributed to themselves, highlighting a divergence between experienced and perceived empathy within the dyad. Neuroimaging results revealed role- and condition-dependent associations between interbrain synchrony and emotional empathy. In children, emotional empathy during positive sharing was associated with a distributed positive frontoparietal synchrony pattern involving the child's right IPL and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), coupled with multiple parental frontal and parietal regions. Parents’ evaluations of the child's empathy were associated with a broader positive pattern predominantly involving the parent's bilateral DLPFC and medial prefrontal ROI coupled with the child's IFG and IPL. In the neutral condition, the associations were weaker and predominantly inverse in both children and parents. Together, these findings suggest that parent-child empathy is supported by role- and context-dependent interbrain synchrony across frontal and parietal regions, providing further insight into the development of empathic processing.