Covarying stress hormones during empathic stress in the family

Being able to reproduce others’ feelings and emotions is essential for adaptive behavior and understanding our environment, especially in complex social situations. At the same time, we need to be able to either help others or distance ourselves from the transmitted negative emotions in order to avoid negative consequences from feeling with others. This is especially relevant is in children of chronically stressed parents, who still lack the ability to distance themselves. In their recently published study, Jost Ulrich Blasberg, Philipp Kanske, and Veronika Engert found that children with higher empathic stress also showed more similar stress hormone responses as their parents after seeing them in a stressful social situation. The stress resonance and the stress hormone association within families were also related to adolescents’ attachment behavior.

For more information, you can find the full study here