This study is of direct interest to policymakers because it is believed that psychopathy is related to the medial frontal cortex; therefore, it can be measured.
"While the exact social cost of
psychopathy
is difficult to ascertain and perhaps a contested issue (
Verona and Joyner, 2023
), reducing these costs has been a primary motivation for research into potential neurobiological causes of psychopathy (
Glenn and Raine, 2014
,
Nadelhoffer et al., 2012
). "
"Several theories have posited a vital role for vmPFC in the etiology of psychopathy, founded primarily in evidence from
neuropsychological assessments
of human patients with vmPFC damage and from
neuroimaging studies
of healthy human participants. This evidence has established a role for vmPFC in decision-making (e.g., representing the value of stimuli and outcomes), emotion (e.g., representing negative affect, regulating negative affect and pain), and
social cognition
(e.g., empathy;
Hiser and Koenigs, 2018
). "
"Though relatively less theoretical work has linked psychopathy to a third medial frontal region, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC;
Fig. 1
), there is reason to consider this region as a potential key neural correlate as well. Evidence from healthy people has implicated dmPFC broadly in
social cognition
(e.g., thinking about oneself (
Whitfield-Gabrieli et al., 2011
), thinking about other people (
Denny et al., 2012
), and
social interactions
(
Skerry and Saxe, 2014
;
Wagner et al., 2016
)). Additionally, dmPFC is a node within the
default mode network
, a constellation of regions whose activity tends to decrease when a person engages in an externally-focused task (
Raichle, 2015
). Our previous meta-analysis found that psychopathy was related to dmPFC overactivity across a variety of tasks (
Deming and Koenigs, 2020
). This finding aligned with a proposal made by Freeman and colleagues, that psychopathic individuals fail to adaptively inhibit dmPFC activity (and activity within other medial default mode network regions) when engaged in externally-focused tasks (
Freeman et al., 2015
). However, an earlier meta-analysis contradicted this finding:
Poeppl et al. (2018)
found that psychopathy was related to dmPFC
underactivity across studies and proposed this may contribute to psychopathic individuals’ lack of empathy and remorse."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763424003737?dgcid=raven_sd_recommender_email#bib181
Deming, P., Griffiths, S., Jalava, J., Koenigs, M., & Larsen, R. R. (2024). Psychopathy and medial frontal cortex: A systematic review reveals predominantly null relationships.
Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews,
167, 105904. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2024.105904
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