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

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.