Domínguez-Arriola Marcos E, Olalde-Mathieu Víctor E, Garza-Villarreal Eduardo A, Barrios Fernando A
Instituto de Neurobiología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Campus Juriquilla, Blvd. Juriquilla 3001, 76230, Querétaro, Mexico.
Brain Topogr. 2022 Nov;35(5-6):613-626. doi: 10.1007/s10548-022-00910-3. Epub 2022 Aug 21.
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.
共情能力已被证明与大脑结构变化有关。由于心理治疗师群体往往表现出更强的共情能力，如在认知共情和情绪调节方面的心理测量差异所示，我们旨在确定一组专业心理治疗师与对照组之间的皮质厚度（CT）差异。为了符合最近强调的在皮质分析中采用多种工作流程的要求，我们使用了两种皮质表面提取和厚度估计管道——CIVET和FreeSurfer。18名心理治疗师和18名对照组人员接受了MRI扫描，并完成了与共情相关的心理测量评估。我们评估了两组之间CT测量值的差异，以及在一系列感兴趣区域（ROI）中是否与个体共情相关得分存在关联。我们使用CIVET进行的分析表明，心理治疗师在左侧背外侧前额叶皮质（dlPFC）的一个ROI处显示出显著更大的CT（p < 0.05，FDR校正）。使用FreeSurfer进行全脑逐顶点分析时，在左侧前额叶皮质中发现了一个具有统计学意义的簇，该簇与先前的ROI部分重叠。结构协方差分析进一步证实了这些结果，该分析表明，在心理治疗师中，左侧dlPFC ROI似乎与皮质的其他部分独立变化。这些发现具有重要意义，因为dlPFC区域在共情反应的认知成分中起着重要作用，如情绪调节和换位思考。因此，我们的研究结果支持了共情能力由大脑结构变化反映的观点，同时也是首次对共情反应在其职业中至关重要的受试者样本进行研究。
