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bioRxiv · 10.1101/2021.01.02.425096

The Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex Presents Structural Variations Associated with Empathic Capacity in Psychotherapists

Dominguez Arriola, E.·Olalde Mathieu, V. E.·Garza-Villarreal, E. A.·Barrios, F. A.
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Abstract

Empathic capacity has been shown to be correlated with brain structural variations, such as cortical thickness. Since psychotherapists have a constant demand to modulate their empathic response, in this study we compared cortical thickness between a group of psychotherapists and a control group at prefrontal and cingulate brain regions, and investigated how this is correlated with their empathic skills. Eighteen psychotherapists and eighteen healthy controls underwent 3-Tesla MRI scanning and completed empathy-related psychometric assessments. Cortical thickness (CT) measures were estimated for each participant. We evaluated how these measures differed between groups, and if they were associated with individual empathy-related scores in a series of regions of interest. Our analysis shows that psychotherapists display a significantly greater CT at a region in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC; p < 0.05, FDR corrected). Moreover, psychotherapists CT in this region is correlated with the tendency to feel empathically concerned for others (p < 0.01, FDR corrected). This finding is relevant because the dlPFC region participates strongly in the cognitive components of the empathic response, such as emotion regulation and perspective-taking processes. 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.

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Dominguez Arriola, E., Olalde Mathieu, V. E., Garza-Villarreal, E. A., Barrios, F. A.. 2021-01-04. The Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex Presents Structural Variations Associated with Empathic Capacity in Psychotherapists. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.01.02.425096

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