Abstract
Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterised by atypical moral behaviour likely rooted in atypical affective/motivational processing, as opposed to an inability to judge the wrongness of an action. Guilt is a moral emotion believed to play a crucial role in adherence to moral and social norms, but the mechanisms by which guilt (or lack thereof) may influence behaviour in individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits are unclear. We measured neural responses during the anticipation of guilt about committing potential everyday moral transgressions, and tested the extent to which these varied with psychopathic traits. We found a significant interaction between the degree to which anticipated guilt was modulated in the anterior insula and interpersonal psychopathic traits: anterior insula modulation of anticipated guilt was weaker in individuals with higher levels of these traits. Data from a second sample confirmed that this pattern of findings was specific to the modulation of anticipated guilt and not related to the perceived wrongness of the transgression. These results suggest a central role for the anterior insula in coding the anticipation of guilt regarding potential moral transgressions and advance our understanding of the neurocognitive mechanisms that may underlie propensity to antisocial behaviour.
Highlights
Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterised by atypical moral behaviour likely rooted in atypical affective/motivational processing, as opposed to an inability to judge the wrongness of an action
Individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits, which include blunted affect and a lack of empathy and guilt, have an increased risk of engaging in irresponsible and antisocial behaviours[2]. They do not appear to differ from individuals with low levels of these traits in relation to their moral judgment ability, i.e. the ability to judge whether an action is immoral or not[3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. They do report less difficulty in making decisions when faced with moral dilemmas[6,7,9] and present diminished neural responses in the amygdala and other regions typically associated with affective processing when they perform moral judgment tasks[4,5,8,12,13]
We developed a novel fMRI task with guilt-eliciting everyday moral scenarios, and set out to test whether variance in psychopathic traits is associated with neural processing of anticipated guilt for personal, everyday moral transgressions
Summary
Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterised by atypical moral behaviour likely rooted in atypical affective/motivational processing, as opposed to an inability to judge the wrongness of an action. Individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits, which include blunted affect and a lack of empathy and guilt, have an increased risk of engaging in irresponsible and antisocial behaviours[2] They do not appear to differ from individuals with low levels of these traits in relation to their moral judgment ability, i.e. the ability to judge whether an action is immoral or not[3,4,5,6,7,8,9] (though see refs 10, 11 for exceptions). Previous neuroimaging studies on moral processing in psychopathy have relied on paradigms that involved judging actions from a third person perspective[5,13] and judging highly hypothetical and often extreme moral dilemmas (e.g. killing one person to save the lives of many)[4,8] It is still unclear whether individual differences in psychopathic traits are associated with atypical neural processing of first-person scenarios for more normative www.nature.com/scientificreports/. Investigating the neural correlates involved in processing the anticipation of guilt about committing more ordinary everyday moral transgressions may provide important cues to the mechanisms that underlie propensity to antisocial behaviour
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