Structural MRI (grey matter volume) associations with self-report empathy questionnaire

Description: 125 children (M age [SD] = 10 years [4 months], n females [%] = 66 [52]) . The current study used a subset of data from the Families and Childhood Transitions Study (FACTS), a longitudinal, community-based cohort study. Cognitive empathy, affective empathy (i.e., affective sharing), and sympathy (i.e., empathic concern) were measured by a self-report questionnaire measure, the Adolescent Measure of Empathy and Sympathy (AMES; Vossen et al., 2015). Empathic distress was measured by the Empathic Responsiveness Questionnaire (ERQ: Olweus & Endresen, 1998). Children at initial wave were screened (and excluded) for significant motor or sensory impairment, developmental or intellectual disorder, neurological conditions, history of head trauma/loss of consciousness, regular psychoactive or steroid medications, claustrophobia, and presence/likelihood of non-removable ferrous metals in their body. Recruitment (occurring mostly through schools) targeted metropolitan areas classified as falling within the lower tertile of socioeconomic disadvantage. Note: Pre-processing consisted of mostly standard VBM processing procedures implemented in CAT12, described in the manual (http://dbm.neuro.uni-jena.de/cat12/CAT12-Manual.pdf) apart from several changes as recommended for paediatric samples. The Cerebromatic (COM) Toolbox was used to create age and sex matched tissue probability maps, then a customised DARTEL template was created within CAT12 based on these maps.

Communities: developmental