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

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroimaging

Background:

• Empathic abilities are associated with brain structural variations.
• Psychotherapists often demonstrate heightened empathic skills, particularly in cognitive empathy and emotional regulation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate cortical thickness (CT) differences between professional psychotherapists and a control group.
• To explore the association between CT variations and empathy-related scores in psychotherapists.

Main Methods:

• Utilized two distinct cortical surface extraction and thickness estimation pipelines: CIVET and FreeSurfer.
• Collected MRI data and empathy-related psychometric assessments from 18 psychotherapists and 18 controls.
• Performed region of interest (ROI) and whole-brain vertex-wise analyses.

Main Results:

• Psychotherapists showed significantly greater CT in a left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) ROI (p < 0.05, FDR corrected) using CIVET.
• FreeSurfer analysis identified a significant cluster in the left PFC, partially overlapping with the dlPFC ROI.
• Structural covariance analysis indicated that the left dlPFC ROI varied independently in psychotherapists.

Conclusions:

• Findings support the link between empathic capacity and brain structural variations.
• The dlPFC, involved in emotion regulation and perspective-taking, may underlie the enhanced empathy observed in psychotherapists.
• This study is the first to examine brain structure in a professional group where empathy is paramount.