Brain‐to‐brain synchrony in parent‐child dyads and the relationship with emotion regulation revealed by fNIRS‐based hyperscanning

By Vanessa Reindl, C. Gerloff, Wolfgang Scharke, Kerstin Konrad. NeuroImage, 2018

348 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Parent‐child synchrony, the coupling of behavioral and biological signals during social contact, may fine‐tune the child's brain circuitries associated with emotional bond formation and the child's development of emotion regulation. Here, we examined the neurobiological underpinnings of these processes by measuring parent's and child's prefrontal neural activity concurrently with functional near‐infrared spectroscopy hyperscanning. Each child played both a cooperative and a competitive game with the parent, mostly the mother, as well as an adult stranger. During cooperation, parent's and child's brain activities synchronized in the dorsolateral prefrontal and frontopolar cortex (FPC), which was predictive for their cooperative performance in subsequent trials. No significant brain‐to‐brain synchrony was observed in the conditions parent‐child competition, stranger‐child cooperation and stranger‐child competition. Furthermore, parent‐child compared to stranger‐child brain‐to‐brain synchrony during cooperation in the FPC mediated the association between the parent's and the child's emotion regulation, as assessed by questionnaires. Thus, we conclude that brain‐to‐brain synchrony may represent an underlying neural mechanism of the emotional connection between parent and child, which is linked to the child's development of adaptive emotion regulation. Future studies may uncover whether brain‐to‐brain synchrony can serve as a neurobiological marker of the dyad's socio‐emotional interaction, which is sensitive to risk conditions, and can be modified by interventions. HighlightsBrain activities of parent and child synchronize during cooperation.No significant brain‐to‐brain synchrony for stranger‐child dyads.Parent‐child brain‐to‐brain synchrony predicts cooperative performance.Parent‐child brain‐to‐brain synchrony is linked to child's emotion regulation.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychiatry and Mental health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0021efbf213efaea8f9a17b5361fc72b9eee886c

Citations in the corpus

• Distinct developmental changes in linear and nonlinear neural interactions across infancy and adulthood (2025, unknown): “…of functional brain connectivity during early life depends on social experience and is best understood in the context of sca ff olding interactions with a caregiver (Endevelt-Shapira and Feldman, 2023; Ilyka et al., 2021; Li et al., 2023; Perone and Gartstein, 2019; Reindl et al., 2018).”