Empathic stress in the family: Does diurnal cortisol covariation between adolescents and their parents influence adolescent empathic stress in the laboratory?

Empathic stress is the reproduction of psychological and physiological stress activation in an observer of a directly stressed target individual. It likely allows us to allocate the energy necessary to jointly alleviate a stressor at hand. The tendency to show such an empathic or "second-hand" stress response depends on the relationship between target and observer.

Empathic stress in the mother-child dyad: Multimodal evidence for empathic stress in children observing their mothers during direct stress exposure.

Relationship closeness determines the propensity to spontaneously reproduce another's emotional and physiological stress response. We investigated whether psychosocial stress in mothers is causally linked to such empathic stress in children. Mothers ( = 76) completed either a standardized laboratory stressor or a stress-free control task, while their middle childhood-aged children (8-12 years old) were watching.