• Phillips, M. L.
• Daly, E.
• Murphy, D. G.
• Tunstall, N.
• Surguladze, S.
• Dowsett, J.
• Robertson, D.
• Fahy, T.
• Brammer, M. J.
• Giampietro, V.
• Clarke, A.
• Beer, D.
• Mezey, G.
• Ambikapathy, A.
• Deeley, Quinton

Abstract

<jats:sec><jats:title>Background</jats:title><jats:p>It has been suggested that people with psychopathic disorders lackempathy because they have deficits in processing distress cues (e.g.fearful facial expressions).</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title>Aims</jats:title><jats:p>To investigate brain function when individuals with psychopathy and acontrol group process facial emotion.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title>Method</jats:title><jats:p>Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging we compared sixpeople scoring ⩾25 on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist–Revised and ninenon-psychopathic healthy volunteers during an implicit emotion processingtask using fearful, happy and neutral faces.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title>Results</jats:title><jats:p>The psychopathy group showed significantly less activation than thecontrol group in fusiform and extrastriate cortices when processing bothfacial emotions. However, emotion type affected response pattern. Bothgroups increased fusiform and extrastriate cortex activation whenprocessing happy faces compared with neutral faces, but this increase wassignificantly smaller in the psychopathy group. In contrast, whenprocessing fearful faces compared with neutral faces, the control groupshowed increased activation but the psychopathy group decreasedactivation in the fusiform gyrus.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title>Conclusions</jats:title><jats:p>People with psychopathy have biological differences from controls whenprocessing facial emotion, and the pattern of response differs accordingto emotion type.</jats:p></jats:sec>

Topics

• laser emission spectroscopy
• activation
• size-exclusion chromatography