Kun-Hsien Chou1, I-Yun Chen2, Pei-Chin Chen3, Ya-Wei Cheng2, Jean Decety4, Ching-Po Lin2,3
1Institute of Biomedical Engineering, National Yang Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan; 2Institute of Neuroscience, National Yang Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan; 3Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Radiological Sciences, National Yang Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan; 4The University of Chicago, Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry, Chicago, USA
Females frequently perform better in interpersonal sensitivity than males. The mirror-neuron-system (MNS) has been proposed to play an important role in social cognition. It remains to be clarified whether the neuroanatomy of MNS exhibits sex differences. With the use of T1-VBM concurrent with the dispositional empathy measures, we demonstrate that females had larger gray matter volume in the pars opercularis and inferior parietal lobule than males. Moreover, self-report scores in the emotional empathic disposition was correlated with gray matter volume of the pars opercularis across all participants. These results indicate that the existence of neuroanatomical sex differences in the MNS.
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