PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Victor E. Olalde-Mathieu
AU  - Federica Sassi
AU  - Azalea Reyes-Aguilar
AU  - Roberto E. Mercadillo
AU  - Sarael Alcauter
AU  - Fernando A. Barrios
TI  - GREATER EMPATHIC ABILITIES AND THEIR CORELATION WITH RESTING STATE BRAIN CONNECTIVITY IN PSYCHOTHERAPISTS COMPARED TO NON-PSYCHOTHERAPISTS
AID  - 10.1101/2020.07.01.182998
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.07.01.182998
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/07/02/2020.07.01.182998.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/07/02/2020.07.01.182998.full
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.