Emotional Brains Physically Different than Rational Brains, Study

According to a new study, researchers have been able to spot physical differences in brain structures of people who respond emotionally to other's feelings when compared to those whose response is more rational.

Robert Eres from Monash University's School of Psychological Sciences was the lead author in the study.

"People who are high on affective empathy are often those who get quite fearful when watching a scary movie, or start crying during a sad scene. Those who have high cognitive empathy are those who are more rational, for example a clinical psychologist counselling a client," Eres said.

The study included 176 participants where the researchers used a neuroimaging analysis technique known as voxel based morphometry (VBM) that allowed the experts to evaluate focal differences in the brain through statistical data.

The imaging technique was used to check whether it matched the high scores participants got in their tests for either emotional or cognitive empathy.

The tests also showed that people who got high scores for affective empathy had greater brain density in the insula region which found in the middle portion of the brain while those exhibiting higher cognitive empathy were seen to have greater brain density in the midcingulate cortex or the region above the corpus callosum.

"Taken together, these results provide validation for empathy being a multi-component construct, suggesting that affective and cognitive empathy are differentially represented in brain morphometry as well as providing convergent evidence for empathy being represented by different neural and structural correlates," researchers said.

"In the future we want to investigate causation by testing whether training people on empathy related tasks can lead to changes in these brain structures and investigate if damage to these brain structures, as a result of a stroke for example, can lead to empathy impairments," said Eres.