Psychopathy

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Introduction
Psychopathy is a personality disorder whose core diagnostic features include increased fearlessness, shallow affect, callousness, and poor behavioral inhibition. The actions of psychopaths often come at a large cost to society and its citizens, and their empathetic deficit is one of the reasons psychopaths can be so efficiently destructive in many people’s lives. The importance of understanding this deficit cannot be over-asserted. If psychopathic empathetic deficit can be understood, treatment would likely not only expand in variety but in effectiveness. Thus, this research may provide a possible remedy to a costly societal problem due not only the actions of criminal psychopaths but criminal offenders in general . However, the neural mechanism behind this empathetic deficit is still poorly understood. One common hypothesis to explain empathetic deficit is an inability to process emotional stimuli, especially expressive faces, in psychopaths.
Kawasaki et al. (2001) explored the relationship between emotional sensory stimuli and the prefrontal cortex. They looked at neuron response in a 48-year old epilepsy patient using depth electrodes to record neuron activity. They found a short latency to aversive stimuli in the ventral prefrontal cortex.
The inability for individuals high in psychopathy to process emotional stimuli can further be explored by assessing how they respond to specific emotional stimuli, specifically facial expressions. Decety et al. (2014) did an in-depth look at facial expression processing in individuals high in psychopathy with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants viewed fearful, sad, happy, and pained dynamic facial expressions. They found that individuals with high PC...

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...otional faces, is a primary factor in the empathetic deficit that is characteristic of a psychopathic personality disorder diagnosis. The specific mechanism may be determined by the timing of activation in BA44, the amygdala, and the PFC. If an early activation of BA44 is found, this will indicate that a deficit in empathy most likely stems from a problem with the mirror neuron system, and since an individual high in psychopathy cannot process faces correctly, the link between emotional faces and the amygdala will be broken and decreased amygdala activity will result. The PFC uses emotional input from the amygdala to make decisions, so a deficit in the amygdala from BA44 will result in callous decisions that ignore fear responses in other humans. This would explain how psychopaths are able to ignore individuals who are in pain or frightened when most humans cannot.

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