Abstract
Psychopathy is a personality disorder that involves a constellation of traits including callous-unemotionality, manipulativeness, and impulsiveness. Here we review recent advances in the research of functional neural correlates of psychopathic personality traits in adults. We first provide a concise overview of functional neuroimaging findings in clinical samples diagnosed with the PCL-R. We then review studies with community samples that have focused on how individual differences in psychopathic traits (variously measured) relate to individual differences in brain function. Where appropriate, we draw parallels between the findings from these studies and those with clinical samples. Extant data suggest that individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits show lower activity in affect-processing brain areas to emotional/salient stimuli, and that attenuated activity may be dependent on the precise content of the task. They also seem to show higher activity in regions typically associated with reward processing and cognitive control in tasks involving moral processing, decision making, and reward. Furthermore, affective-interpersonal and lifestyle-antisocial facets of psychopathy appear to be associated with different patterns of atypical neural activity. Neuroimaging findings from community samples typically mirror those observed in clinical samples, and largely support the notion that psychopathy is a dimensional construct.
Highlights
The affective facet includes characteristics such as lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect, callousness, and lack of empathy, whereas the interpersonal facet includes characteristics such as superficial charm, grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological deception, and manipulation of others
Individuals with high psychopathy, compared with healthy controls, showed significantly less activity in the right inferior frontal gyrus before choosing the low-risk options under high uncertainty. Their response in the inferior frontal gyrus was higher when choosing the high-risk option. These findings indicate that individuals with psychopathy present atypical brain function during decision making, which was interpreted by the authors as reflecting diminished emotional arousal in anticipation of possible punishment and diminished ability to emotionally represent uncertainty, as well as atypical emotional and behavioral regulation
Findings from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research largely support the notion that psychopathy is a dimensional construct, with findings from community samples typically mirroring those observed in clinical/forensic samples
Summary
The affective facet includes characteristics such as lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect, callousness, and lack of empathy, whereas the interpersonal facet includes characteristics such as superficial charm, grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological deception, and manipulation of others. Prehn et al (2013) compared offenders with high levels of psychopathy (PCL-R range: 23–29, n = 11) with a group of offenders with antisocial and borderline personality disorder (n = 12) and a control group of healthy individuals (n = 13) performing a decision-making task involving highand low-risk economic decisions.
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