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

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.