Neural correlates of psychopathy: A comprehensive review

Psychopathy is a personality disorder traditionally characterized by abnormal affective-interpersonal traits, such as lack of empathy and manipulativeness, and by deviant lifestyle-antisocial characteristics, such as impulsiveness and repeated antisocial behavior. The extreme profile of criminals with psychopathy has long intrigued and captured the attention of both laymen and academics. In the past two decades, with the development of neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), research to probe the neural correlates that underlie this personality disorder in offenders has vastly grown. In this chapter, we provide an up-to-date comprehensive review of findings from these studies as well as from studies that inspect neural correlates of the continuum of psychopathic personality traits in samples from the general population. The existent literature suggests that individuals scoring high in psychopathy have reduced neural responses to emotional/salient stimuli in brain areas typically implicated in affective processing, while showing augmented responses during reward, decision-making, inhibitory control, and moral tasks in brain regions involved in cognitive control and reward processing. Furthermore, evidence suggests that distinct domains of psychopathic features—affective-interpersonal and lifestyle-antisocial—are associated with somewhat distinct patterns of atypical brain response activity. Finally, neuroimaging findings from community samples closely correspond to those observed in offender samples, and largely support the notion that psychopathy is a dimensional construct that varies from relatively low to severe levels of personality pathology.