Regular Cannabis Users Scored Higher on One Measure of Emotional Understanding, Small Study Finds
A study of regular cannabis users found higher scores on one measure of cognitive empathy—but it did not show that cannabis makes people more empathetic.
The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience Research in 2024, compared 85 regular cannabis users with 51 people who did not use cannabis. Researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico assessed participants with a 33-item empathy questionnaire and used resting-state functional MRI to examine brain connectivity in a smaller subgroup.
The questionnaire measured several aspects of empathy, including cognitive empathy—the ability to recognize and understand another person’s emotional state—and affective empathy, which involves sharing or responding to another person’s feelings. Cannabis users scored higher than non-users on the test’s “Emotional Comprehension” measure. The groups did not show statistically significant differences across the other empathy subscales.
In the imaging portion of the research, 46 cannabis users and 34 controls underwent fMRI scans. Compared with controls, the cannabis-user group showed stronger functional connectivity between the anterior cingulate cortex and regions involved in somatosensory processing. The researchers also observed stronger connectivity within a network associated with empathy.
The anterior cingulate cortex is involved in a range of functions, including emotional processing, cognitive control and social understanding. The imaging results may offer one possible explanation for the difference in emotional-comprehension scores, but the study did not establish that cannabis use caused either the behavioral or brain-connectivity differences.
That limitation is important because the research was observational. Participants were not randomly assigned to use cannabis, and the researchers could not determine whether the differences existed before regular use began. The analysis also relied partly on self-reported substance use and accounted for some—but not all—potentially relevant factors, including differences between the groups in age, sex, alcohol use and tobacco use.
The findings also do not demonstrate that cannabis improves communication, relationships or mental health. They describe an association between regular cannabis use, one self-reported measure of emotional understanding and patterns of resting-state brain connectivity. Earlier research has reported mixed effects of cannabis on emotion recognition and social cognition, including studies finding impaired or altered processing under some conditions.
Product strength and patterns of use may further limit how broadly the results can be applied. Cannabis effects can vary with THC concentration, frequency of use, age at first use, the presence of other substances and individual differences. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s overview of cannabis and brain health notes that cannabis can affect attention, memory, decision-making, emotions and reaction time, while emphasizing that effects depend on factors such as dose and age.
Overall, the Mexican study provides a starting point for investigating how cannabis and the endocannabinoid system may relate to social and emotional processing. Larger, longitudinal and controlled studies will be needed to determine whether cannabis contributes to changes in empathy—or whether people with particular emotional or social characteristics are simply more likely to use it.
The paper is also indexed in PubMed.
