Empathy-related differences in the anterior cingulate functional connectivity of regular cannabis users when compared to controls.

It has been reported that cannabis consumption affects the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a structure with a central role in mediating the empathic response. In this study, we compared psychometric scores of empathy subscales, between a group of regular cannabis users (85, users) and a group of non-consumers (51, controls). We found that users have a greater Emotional Comprehension, a cognitive empathy trait involving the understanding of the "other" emotional state. Resting state functional MRI in a smaller sample (users = 46, controls = 34) allowed to identify greater functional connectivity (FC) of the ACC with the left somatomotor cortex (SMC), in users when compared to controls. These differences were also evident within the empathy core network, where users showed greater within network FC. The greater FC showed by the users is associated with emotional representational areas and empathy-related regions. In addition, the differences in psychometric scores suggest that users have more empathic comprehension. These findings suggest a potential association between cannabis use, a greater comprehension of the other's affective state and the functional brain organization of the users. However, further research is needed to explore such association, since many other factors may be at play.

The Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex Presents Structural Variations Associated with Empathy and Emotion Regulation in Psychotherapists.

Empathic abilities have been shown to be linked with brain structural variations. Since psychotherapists constitute a population that tends to display greater empathic abilities, as shown in psychometric differences in cognitive empathy and emotional regulation, we aimed to identify cortical thickness (CT) differences between a group of professional psychotherapists and a control group. In line with the recently emphasized urge to employ more than a single workflow in cortical analyses, we utilized two cortical surface extraction and thickness estimation pipelines-CIVET and FreeSurfer. Eighteen psychotherapists and eighteen controls underwent MRI scanning and completed empathy-related psychometric assessments. We evaluated how CT measures differed between groups and if there was an association with individual empathy-related scores in a series of regions of interest (ROIs). Our analysis with CIVET shows that psychotherapists display a significantly greater CT at a ROI in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC; p < 0.05, FDR corrected). With FreeSurfer, a whole-brain vertex-wise analysis identified a statistically significant cluster in the left PFC that partially overlaps with the previous ROI. These results were reinforced by a structural covariance analysis revealing that, in psychotherapists, the left dlPFC ROI seemed to vary independently from the rest of the cortex. These findings are relevant because the dlPFC region importantly participates in the cognitive components of the empathic response, such as emotion regulation and perspective taking. Thus, our findings support the idea that empathic capacity is reflected by brain structural variations while also studying for the first time a sample of subjects for whom empathic responding is crucial in their profession.

Greater Empathic Abilities and Resting State Brain Connectivity Differences in Psychotherapists Compared to Non-psychotherapists.

In a therapeutic environment a proper regulation of the empathic response strengthens the patient-therapist relationship. Thus, it is important that psychotherapists constantly regulate their own perspective and emotions to better understand the other's affective state. We compared the empathic abilities of a group of 52 psychotherapists with a group of 92 non-psychotherapists and found psychometric differences. Psychotherapists showed greater scores in Fantasy and Perspective Taking, both cognitive empathy constructs, and lower scores in the use of expressive suppression, an emotional regulation strategy that hampers the empathic response, suggesting that psychotherapists exert top-down processes that influence their empathic response. In addition, the expected sex differences in empathic concern and expressive suppression were only present in the non-psychotherapist group. To see if such psychometric differences were related to a distinctive functional organization of brain networks, we contrasted the resting state functional connectivity of empathy-related brain regions between a group of 18 experienced psychotherapists and a group of 18 non-psychotherapists. Psychotherapists showed greater functional connectivity between the left anterior insula and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and less connectivity between rostral anterior cingulate cortex and the orbito prefrontal cortex. Both associations correlated with Perspective Taking scores. Considering that the psychometric differences between groups were in the cognitive domain and that the functional connectivity associations involve areas related to cognitive regulation processes, these results suggest a relationship between the functional brain organization of psychotherapists and the cognitive regulation of their empathic response.