Psyopaths In The Amygdala

Diversity across cultures differs remarkably when it comes to social norms, but among all these different cultures lies one similarity: psychopaths. A psychopath is defined as a person suffering from a mental illness who portrays abnormal or violent behavior, has deficient emotional processing, and an absence of morals pertaining to appropriate decision making. Despite the growing research in the field of psychopathology and neurobiology, the neural substrates underlying these bizarre and fierce behaviors are still uncertain. However, a plethora of previous studies have linked psychopathic behavior to emotional cortical and subcortical areas, primarily the amygdala. The following three studies explore the relationships between affective brain areas and the eccentric behavior of a psychopath by using 3 different stimuli: images, words, and faces.
To begin with, the purpose of the first experiment was to uncover which brain areas are associated with abnormal emotional processing and the subsequent disturbed social interactions that follow. The total amount of participants after excluding 2 due to artifacts was 12 right handed males. The control group was composed of 6 healthy males who had no history of neuropsychiatric problems, a mean age of 28.8, and standard deviation of 4.14. The experimental group was composed of 6 psychopathic individuals who were convicted criminals and taken from a high security psychiatric ward with a mean age of 33, and a standard deviation of 8. The researchers measured psychopathy by using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R [that measured psychopathy on a scale of 0-40]). They used the Positive and Negative Affect schedule (PANAS) to assess global affect states before conducting the experim...

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...ide the limbic system, which indicate that psychopaths use non-limbic, cognitive strategies to process affective stimuli. The third study discovered significant reduced activation for fearful faces in areas responsible for processing facial emotion in psychopaths. Also, psychopathic individuals displayed reduced visual cortical activation when being exposed to both fearful and happy faces, suggesting that the neural underpinnings for processing happy facial expressions are intact in psychopathic individuals, but are less responsive regular individuals. Abnormal facial emotion recognition processing leads to violent, inappropriate, and less empathic behavior. While the etiology of this disorder is still unknown, these experiments have constructed a foundation for future research to uncover more about the abnormalities lying within the psychopathic brain.