Blasberg Jost Ulrich, Kanske Philipp, Engert Veronika
Institute of Psychosocial Medicine, Psychotherapy and Psychooncology, Jena University Hospital, Friedrich-Schiller University, Jena, Germany.
Clinical Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology, Technische Universität, Dresden, Germany.
Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2025 Mar;173:107280. doi: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2025.107280. Epub 2025 Jan 10.
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. Here, we investigated whether adolescents' empathic stress responses to their parents' acute stress experience were associated with the diurnal cortisol covariation the parent-adolescent dyad shared in everyday life. Fathers and mothers (N = 77) were confronted with a standardized laboratory stressor, the Trier Social Stress Test, while their adolescent children (13-16 years old) were watching. In the laboratory, parents and their adolescent children simultaneously provided multiple samples of salivary cortisol. On the weekend following the testing session, dyads provided diurnal cortisol samples over two days. These were used to gain a measure of the dyads' adrenocortical physiological attunement in everyday life. We found that the degree to which dyads covaried in their diurnal cortisol activity significantly increased adolescents' tendency for empathic stress responding in the laboratory. The amount of time that dyads spent together over the weekend, adolescents' attachment experiences, dyad type (father-daughter, mother-daughter, father-son, mother-son), and adolescents' puberty status did not significantly alter this relationship. Adolescent attachment avoidance, however, was negatively correlated with both adolescents' cortisol stress reactivity in the laboratory and the degree to which they covaried with their parents' diurnal cortisol release. We conclude that diurnal cortisol covariation between parents and adolescents is positively associated with stress resonance in the laboratory.
共情应激是指直接承受压力的目标个体的观察者在心理和生理上再现应激激活状态。它可能使我们能够分配必要的能量，以共同缓解眼前的应激源。表现出这种共情或“二手”应激反应的倾向取决于目标个体与观察者之间的关系。在此，我们研究了青少年对父母急性应激经历的共情应激反应是否与父母-青少年二元组在日常生活中共享的昼夜皮质醇协变有关。父亲和母亲（N = 77）在接受标准化实验室应激源——特里尔社会应激测试时，他们13至16岁的青少年子女在一旁观看。在实验室中，父母及其青少年子女同时提供多个唾液皮质醇样本。在测试后的周末，二元组在两天内提供昼夜皮质醇样本。这些样本用于衡量二元组在日常生活中的肾上腺皮质生理协调性。我们发现，二元组昼夜皮质醇活动的协变程度显著增加了青少年在实验室中产生共情应激反应的倾向。二元组在周末共度的时间、青少年的依恋经历、二元组类型（父女、母女、父子、母子）以及青少年的青春期状态并未显著改变这种关系。然而，青少年的依恋回避与青少年在实验室中的皮质醇应激反应性以及他们与父母昼夜皮质醇释放的协变程度均呈负相关。我们得出结论，父母与青少年之间的昼夜皮质醇协变与实验室中的应激共鸣呈正相关。
