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Our ability to feel and understand the emotions of others, "empathy," is at the core of our prosocial behaviors such as cooperation and caregiving

Types of empathy: cognitive and affective.

Cognitive empathy

It involves understanding another person's emotions on an intellectual level, taking into consideration someone's situation and how they would react (for example, "putting yourself in someone else's shoes").

Affective empathy,

It is a kind of emotional contagion, where you feel someone's emotion instinctively after observing their expression or other mood indicators.

Understanding how empathy is shaped can help us to decipher parental behavior.

The new finding

• When it comes to biological mechanisms of empathy, scientists are particularly interested in oxytocin, the so-called "love hormone."
• High oxytocin levels predict sensitive parenting, but it isn't clear how the oxytocin-related gene might generate variation in empathy and parental behavior. One possible explanation is epigenetic changes to the gene—a way of altering gene function without changing the actual DNA sequence.
• The findings showed that OXT methylation was positively correlated with a mother's "personal distress," relating to harsh parenting.
• Additionally, OXT methylation was negatively correlated with the volume of gray matter in the right inferior temporal gyrus. In other words, high methylation of the oxytocin gene lowered brain volume in the inferior temporal gyrus while increasing personal distress. 

Source: The Hindu