Father-child dyads exhibit unique inter-subject synchronization during co-viewing of animation video stimuli

Abstract

Inter-subject synchronisation reflects the entrainment of two individuals to each other's brain signals during passive joint tasks. Within the parent-child dyad, the temporal coordination of signals indicates an attunement to each other's emotional states. Despite the ubiquity with which parents and their children watch screen media together, no study has investigated intersubject synchronisation in father-child dyads during such a co-viewing activity. The present study examined whether father-child dyads would exhibit unique inter-subject synchronisation during co-viewing of narrative visual scenes that is unique to the dyad and hence would not be observed in control dyads (i.e. randomly paired signals). Hyperscanning fNIRS was used to record the prefrontal cortex (PFC) signals of 29 fathers and their preschool-aged children (11 girls, 18 boys) as each pair engaged in a typical activity of watching children's shows together. Three 1-min video clips from "Brave", "Peppa Pig" and "The Incredibles" were presented to each dyad and children's ratings of video positivity and familiarity were obtained afterwards. PFC activity was analysed according to four clusters: medial left, medial right, frontal left and frontal right clusters. Results from synchrony analyses demonstrated that true father-child dyads showed significantly greater inter-subject synchronisation than control dyads, especially in the medial left cluster during the emotionally arousing conflict scene. Dyads with older fathers displayed less synchrony and older fathers, compared to younger ones, were also found to exhibit greater activity in the frontal right cluster. These findings point to a unique inter-subject synchronisation that exists in father-child relationships during shared co-viewing of narrative scenes which could be potentially modulated by parental age.

fNIRS-QC: Crowd-Sourced Creation of a Dataset and Machine Learning Model for fNIRS Quality Control

“…The second study (Father-Child synchrony study) consists of fNIRS recordings of Fathers and Children engaging in both a passive video viewing task and an active play task. Only data from fathers (N = 29, Mean Age = 38.1 ± 3.67) have been selected for the current dataset [20].…”

Effects of Hemodynamic Differences on the Assessment of Inter-Brain Synchrony Between Adults and Infants

“…Recently, researchers have begun to investigate inter-brain synchrony between parents and infants and between parents and young children. They reported that inter-brain synchrony increases during cooperative conditions (Reindl et al, 2018;Miller et al, 2019;Nguyen et al, 2021a), during holding infant (Minagawa et al, 2018), during free play with mutual gaze (Piazza et al, 2020), when engaging in verbal turn-taking conversations (Nguyen et al, 2021b), and during joint-watching of movie stimuli (Azhari et al, 2021). These studies support the view that neural synchrony between parents and children may play a key role in the development of social ability.…”

Dataset of parent-child hyperscanning functional near-infrared spectroscopy recordings

“…Mothers’ parenting stress 23 has been found to be associated with reduced brain-to-brain synchrony; and an exploratory study suggests that mothers’ attachment anxiety might also influence brain coupling 53 . Synchrony in father-child dyads was also found during the video stimulation session 54 , possibly associated with father age and parenting experience. When analysing group-level neural activation between mothers and children, asymmetric brain response was found in mothers compared to children when mutual gaze occurred during the play session 55 , where mothers demonstrated PFC deactivation while children showed an activation, implying divergent PFC mechanisms even though dyads are engaged in symmetrical behaviours such as mutual gaze.…”