Abnormal temporal and prefrontal cortical gray matter thinning in psychopaths

Abnormal Structural Correlates of Response Perseveration in Individuals With Psychopathy

“…12,15 Psychopathy was assessed using the PCL-R 1 and supplemented by five sources of collateral data 15 to evaluate 20 distinct psychopathic characteristics (i.e., glibness/superficial charm, grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, conning/manipulation, lack of remorse/guilt, shallow affect, callousness/lack of empathy, failure to accept responsibility for own actions, need for stimulation/proneness to boredom, parasitic lifestyle, poor behavioral control, promiscuous sexual behavior, lack of realistic long-term goals, impulsivity, irresponsibility, juvenile delinquency, early behavior problems, revocation of conditional release, many short-term marital relationships, criminal versatility). The collateral data included 1) the Interpersonal Measure of Psychopathy; 2) self-reported crime and violence assessed using an adult extension of the National Youth Survey self-report delinquency measure; 3) criminal history transcripts obtained from the Department of Justice; 4) data derived from, and behavioral observations made during, the Structured Clinical Interview for Axis I DSM-IV Disorders and Axis II Personality Disorders; and 5) independent IM-P ratings made by two different laboratory assistants during separate phases of testing.…”

“…15 The two groups did not differ in age, gender, ethnicity, handedness, or substance dependence. 12 This cutoff was chosen to be consistent with our previous research on this sample, 9,12,15 and is similar to the optimal cutoff suggested by taxometric analyses of the PCL-R. 16 Full informed, written consent was obtained from all subjects in accordance with Institutional Review Board procedures at University of Southern California. 12 …”

“…12 Response perseveration was assessed using a computerized version of the WCST, 7 and standardized scores were computed for perseverative and nonperseverative errors. 9 We conducted a partial correlation analysis, examining the group difference in the performance scores of the WCST, and findings revealed that increased total PCL–R score correlated significantly with increased WCST perseverative (r=0.2; p=0.027) but not nonperseverative error scores (r=0.12, p=0.12) across the entire sample, while controlling for age and full-scale IQ.…”

“…Uncorrected two-tailed probability (p) or correlation (r) values obtained from statistical tests conducted for each cortical surface point were color-coded and displayed on the averaged cortical surface representations of the entire group to allow initial visualization of group differences. We performed permutation analyses, using masks of frontal and temporal regions of interest generated from an atlas 12 to control for multiple comparisons conducted on thousands of surface points, and corrected p values (two-tailed) were then reported. Given our previous hypothesis, findings outside of the prefrontal and temporal cortex were treated as exploratory.…”

“…12–14 If neural mechanisms leading to structural abnormalities in the frontal and temporal structures are one of the main neurobiological causes of psychopathy, structural deficits should contribute to response perseveration in individuals with psychopathy. Thus, it is hypothesized that there will be exaggerated negative correlations between cortical thickness of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), and the anterior temporal cortex and WCST perseverative error scores in individuals with psychopathy relative to healthy-comparison subjects.…”