People who use cannabis regularly tend to be better at understanding other people’s emotions.
- The anterior cingulum is a brain region linked to empathy.
- In regular cannabis users, this area of the brain shows stronger connectivity with brain regions linked to perceiving the emotional states of others.
- Simply put, people who use cannabis have greater emotional understanding.
Consuming cannabis is generally associated with negative effects on mental health and behavior. However, scientists from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México have highlighted the positive impact of cannabis on interpersonal relationships. In a study, published in the journal Journal of Neuroscience Researchthey analyzed how cannabis consumption affects the anterior cingulate cortex, “a structure that plays a central role in mediating the empathic response.”
Empathy: greater emotional understanding among cannabis users
For the purposes of the work, the researchers compared the psychometric scores in terms of empathy between a group of 85 regular cannabis users and a group of 51 people who do not consume it. A subset of the sample required functional magnetic resonance imaging scans.
The team found that cannabis users have greater emotional understanding. In detail, the anterior cingulum of volunteers consuming cannabis showed stronger connectivity with brain regions linked to the perception of the emotional states of others inside one’s own body. Clearly, cannabis users felt and understood the emotions of others better.
“Potential effects of cannabis” against “sociopathy, social anxiety”
“These findings open an exciting new window for exploring the potential effects of cannabis in aiding treatments of conditions involving deficits in social interactions, such as sociopathy, social anxiety and avoidant personality disorder, among others”, declared Víctor Olalde-Mathieu, author of the work, in a statement.
However, scientists believe that more research needs to be done to explore the link between cannabis use, greater understanding of the emotional state of others and the functional organization of users’ brains, as many other factors may be involved. stake.