RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 GREATER EMPATHIC ABILITIES AND THEIR CORRELATION WITH RESTING STATE BRAIN CONNECTIVITY IN PSYCHOTHERAPISTS COMPARED TO NON-PSYCHOTHERAPISTS
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.07.01.182998
DO 10.1101/2020.07.01.182998
A1 Victor E. Olalde-Mathieu
A1 Federica Sassi
A1 Azalea Reyes-Aguilar
A1 Roberto E. Mercadillo
A1 Sarael Alcauter
A1 Fernando A. Barrios
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/07/11/2020.07.01.182998.abstract
AB Psychotherapists constantly regulate their own perspective and emotions to better understand the “other’s” state. We compared 52 psychotherapists with 92 non-psychotherapists to characterized psychometric constructs like, Fantasy (FS) and Perspective Taking (PT), and the emotion regulation strategy of Expressive Suppression (ES), which hampers the empathic response. Psychotherapists showed greater FS, PT and lower ES scores. In a subsample (36, 18 ea.), we did a functional connectivity (FC) study. Psychotherapists showed greater FC 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 the PT scores and suggest a cognitive regulatory effect related to the empathic response. Considering, that the psychometric differences between groups were in the cognitive domain and that the FC associations are related to cognitive processes, these results suggest that psychotherapists have a greater cognitive regulation over their empathic response.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.