Psychopathic traits mediate guilt-related anterior midcingulate activity under authority pressure

Abstract

Coercive power has different effects on individuals, and which were unable to be fully addressed in Milgram’s famous studies on obedience to authority. While some individuals exhibited high levels of guilt-related anxiety and refused orders to harm, others followed coercive orders throughout the whole event. The lack of guilt is a well-known characteristic of psychopathy, and recent evidence portrays psychopathic personalities on a continuum of clustered traits, while being pervasive in a significant proportion in the population. To investigate whether psychopathic traits better explain discrepancies in antisocial behavior under coercion, we applied a virtual obedience paradigm, in which an experimenter ordered subjects to press a handheld button to initiate successive actions that carry different moral consequences, during fMRI scanning. Psychopathic traits modulated the association between harming actions and guilt feelings on both behavioral and brain levels. This study sheds light on the individual variability in response to coercive power.

Neuromodulation of the right temporoparietal junction alters amygdala functional connectivity to authority pressure

“…Cathodal tDCS accelerated harming RTs, whereas anodal tDCS did not exert such an effect. The present findings replicated a previous study (Cheng et al, 2021 ), regarding longer RTs and more self‐reported violation of subjects' own will for harming than helping. However, as opposed to our hypothesis, enhancing a sense of agency by applying anodal tDCS to the rTPJ did not change behaviors under authority pressure.…”

“…A virtual obedience paradigm inspired by prior studies on obedience to authority (Caspar et al, 2016 ; Caspar et al, 2018 ; Caspar, Ioumpa, et al, 2020 ; Caspar, Lo Bue, et al, 2020 ; Cheng et al, 2021 ), in which an experimenter ordered a subject to inflict harm to a third party, was designed to measure participants' behavior under authority power (Figure 1 ). During fMRI scanning, participants watching the first image of a mini‐clip of a social interaction were forced (ordered via textual instructions) to press a button in order to initiate successive actions that carried different consequences, including harming, neutral, and helping actions, along with visual feedback of each scenario.…”

“…Finally, to elucidate the tDCS effect on brain function modulated by coercion, a region‐of‐interest (ROI) analysis was conducted for the right and left TPJs, and left orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), based on tDCS placement, and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), anterior insula cortex (AIC), and amygdala. ROIs were determined by recent publications on coercion (Caspar, Ioumpa, et al, 2020 ; Cheng et al, 2021 ). Beyond the existing literature on the effect of authority power during coercive harming, there may be additional cortical regions which are pivotal to the sense of agency.…”

“…In a recent study, we demonstrated that social coercion affects an individual's experience of agency and responsibility (Cheng et al, 2021). In a virtual obedience paradigm, participants watching the first image of a social interaction scenario mini-clip were forced (as ordered by textual instructions) to press a button in order to initiate successive actions that carried different consequences, including harming actions, along with visual feedback of such scenarios.…”

Self-Conscious Emotions and the Right Fronto-Temporal and Right Temporal Parietal Junction

“…Psychopathy is associated with a cluster of traits including manipulativeness, dishonesty, narcissism, superficial charm, reckless risk-taking, impulsive antisocial behavior, and arguably one of the most characteristic traits, lack of guilt [ 51 ]. Psychopaths show significant impairment in the orbital frontal cortex (OFC) and the prefrontal cortex, which are most commonly recognized as the most crucial brain structures to be compromised in violent and antisocial populations [ 52 , 53 ].…”