Neural Empathic Response in Drug-Addicted Mothers.

Several studies showed that a history of substance abuse can compromise mothers’ competences of caring for their children (i.e., parenting). Indeed, it has been shown that neural circuits associated with parental behavior overlap with circuitry involved in addiction; in this vein, substance abuse may subtract neural resources for parenting. According to the neurocognitive model, empathy is the ability of sharing and understanding others’ emotional states. At a neural level, these two aspects result to be dissociable at an either functional and temporal level. Empathy is a fundamental element of parental abilities as it allows to response properly to children’s needs. Empathy deficits might explain the failure reported by drug addicted mothers in caring for their children. In the present study, we monitored event-related potentials (ERPs) during a pain decision task, which is classically used to activate an empathic response, with the aim to track the time-course of neural activity of mothers with (i.e., clinical) and without history of drug addiction (i.e., control group). Stimuli were pictures of adults’ and children’s hand depicted with a harmful tool either hurting the hand or placed nearby. At a behavioral level, drug addicted mothers showed a reduced reactivity to pain when compared to the control group. This difference has been corroborated at a neural level by ERPs results, starting from an early time-window. The neural reaction to pain in the control group correlated with some self-report scales of empathy, reinforcing the idea that the clinical group might report a lack of empathy when compared to a control group. These results are discussed in light of the two components of empathy proposed by the neurocognitive model.