Advances in psychopathic individuals' moral judgments and the underlying neural mechanisms

Abstract

Objective To review psychopathic individuals' moral judgments and the underlying neural mechanisms in order to provide cognitive basis and the corresponding intervention for their socially deviant behavior. Methods Literatures were searched in Academic Search Premier, Science Direct, Highwire, PubMed and Wanfang database by July 2015. Index strategy: AB [psychopathy OR psychopathic] AND AB [moral judgments OR moral reasoning] . Fortyseven articles including six in Chinese were chosen based on their abstracts and key words. Results 33 papers were adopted finally including 2 in Chinese. Most of the papers involved representative empirical studies within five years. Conclusion Compared with non-psychopathic individuals,psychopathic individuals are inclined to consider moral transgressions as more acceptable and are more inclined to make utilitarian moral judgments. Their impairment in moral judgments is associated with dysfunction in specific brain regions such as amygdale,dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,and ventromedial prefrontal cortex,and dysfunction in the basic brain system. Psychopathic individuals' moral judgment impairment needs to be examined within the frame of affect and their moral reasoning processes should be investigated in the future. Key words: Psychopathy; Moral judgments; Amygdale; Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; Ventromedial prefrontal cortex