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Abnormal temporal and prefrontal cortical gray matter thinning in psychopaths

Molecular Psychiatry volume 14, pages 561–562 (2009)Cite this article

Psychopathy is a complex clinical condition conceptualized as a combination of personality features, including shallow affect and egocentricity, as well as behavioral features including impulsivity and poor behavioral controls.1 It has been hypothesized that deficits in the fronto-temporal neural circuit, particularly the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, medial temporal regions and cingulate cortex, may play crucial roles in the neurobiological bases of psychopathy.2, 3 Prefrontal impairments, specifically, have been linked to poor decision making, whereas deficits in the temporal regions have been argued to contribute to the lack of emotion and social dysfunction in psychopathic individuals. We employed a cortical pattern-matching method,4 to investigate localized differences in cortical gray matter thickness in psychopaths compared with that in non-psychopathic controls. We also examined whether the abnormality in cortical thickness is associated differentially with the four distinct facets of psychopathy (namely, Interpersonal, Affective, Lifestyle and Antisocial1).

Regional variations of cortical thickness were examined in 27 psychopaths and 32 normal controls recruited from the community. The demographic, cognitive and diagnostic characteristics of these individuals were obtained,5 and two groups did not differ in age, gender, ethnicity, handedness, or substance abuse (all P>0.2). For each participant, structural magnetic resonance imaging data were collected using a 1.5T Philips S15/ACS scanner (repetition time:echo time=34 ms:12.4 ms; voxel size=0.9 × 0.9 × 1.7 mm).5 Cortical thickness was measured with high spatial resolution at homologous anatomical regions across individuals, using earlier-detailed cortical pattern-matching algorithms.4 The General Linear Model implemented with R (http://www.r-project.org/), examined group differences when controlling for whole brain volumes. Linear regression analyses were used to determine the degree and direction of relationships between psychopathy and cortical gray matter thickness, across the entire sample of 59 individuals. Permutation analyses with a threshold of 0.05 were used to confirm the significance of multiple comparisons carried out at high spatial density. Regions-of-interest for frontal and temporal cortices were obtained from a probabilistic atlas to permute effects specific to these regions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurology, Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Y Yang, A W Toga & K L Narr

  2. Department of Criminology, Psychiatry, and Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA,

    A Raine

  3. Department of Radiology, U.S.C. School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    P Colletti

Authors
  1. Y Yang
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  2. A Raine
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  3. P Colletti
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  4. A W Toga
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  5. K L Narr
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Correspondence to Y Yang.

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Yang, Y., Raine, A., Colletti, P. et al. Abnormal temporal and prefrontal cortical gray matter thinning in psychopaths. Mol Psychiatry 14, 561–562 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2009.12

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