Empathic neural responses in drug-addicted mothers: an Event-Related Potential Investigation.

Mother-infant relationship is crucial for offspring’s development. But, what happens when the mother suffers from drug addiction? Several studies showed that neural circuits associated with parental behavior overlap with circuitry involved in addiction; in this vein, substance abuse may subtract neural resources for parenting. Surprisingly, no previous study has explored neural responses associated with empathy towards both adults’ and children’ pain in mothers with such history. Empathy is a more general construct than parenting and deficits in neural empathic responses may better explain failures in caring of addicted mothers. Furthermore, substantial evidence suggests that drug addiction reduces mentalizing abilities. The neurocognitive model of empathy is appropriate to test this idea because it includes the mentalizing component that can be separately investigated. Event-related potentials (ERPs) have been recorded from drug-addicted mothers (i.e., clinical) and control groups to track neural activity in a pain decision task. Stimuli were color pictures showing one hand in painful (harmful object applied to the hand) and neutral (harmful object near the hand) situations of either an adult or a child (1-3 years old). Neural empathic responses towards adults in pain were comparable in the two groups (ERPs diverged between painful and neutral stimulation in 200-400 ms time-range) but clinical group showed such reaction delayed of approximately 70 ms indexing a sort of slowing down in empathic response in clinical compared to control group. Neural empathic responses towards children in pain differed between the two groups such that ERPs diverged between the painful and neutral stimulation in the P3 component time-range only for the clinical group. We interpreted this pattern as indicating that control group implicitly judged also the neutral situations involving children as potentially painful supporting a lack of mentalizing abilities in the clinical group when compared with controls.