People regularly consuming cannabis tend to show greater empathy: Study

NEW DELHI: A study has found that people regularly using cannabis, or marijuana, tended to have more empathy.

Researchers from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México found through brain imaging that the brain region generally affected by cannabis use and related to empathy, the anterior cingulate, had a stronger connectivity with regions related to sensing the emotional states of others within one's own body.

The anterior cingulate is present in the brain's limbic system, which is involved in emotional behaviour.

The study findings could help in exploring "the potential effects of cannabis in aiding treatments for conditions involving deficits in social interactions, such as sociopathy, social anxiety, and avoidant personality disorder, among others," according to study co-author Víctor Olalde-Mathieu from the university.

The study is published in the Journal of Neuroscience Research.

For the study, the researchers recruited 85 regular cannabis users and 51 non-consumers (controls). The participants completed psychometric tests and were asked to report their cannabis consumption behaviour through questionnaires. Of these participants, 46 users and 34 controls also participated in brain imaging studies.

Of the total group, cannabis users showed a greater ability to recognise and understand other people's emotions and impressions, as adjudged by the Emotional Comprehension (CE) part of the Cognitive and Affective Empathy Test, the researchers found. The test makes use of cognitive and affective approaches to measure an individual's empathetic capacity.

The score differences were found to be greater in the sample that participated in fMRI, they said.

"Given that the anterior cingulate is one of the main (brain) areas heavily involved in the representation of the affective state of others, we believe that the differences shown by regular cannabis users in the emotional comprehension scores and their brain functional connectivity, could be related to the use of cannabis," the researchers wrote in their study.

"We believe that these results contribute to open a pathway to study further the clinical applications of the positive effect that cannabis or cannabis components could have in affect and social interactions," they wrote.