Psychopath Brain Study of the Day: Neuroscientists studying Wisconsin prison inmates may have discovered a neurological explanation for psychopathic behavior.
Michael Koenigs and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin used a mobile brain scanner on two groups of prisoners — 14 psychopaths and 13 non-psychopaths — and discovered that the psychopaths had weaker connections between the brain’s ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.
According to earlier studies, the link between the vmPFC and the amygdala plays an important part in emotional regulation and aggression. Psychologists had observed personality traits reminiscent of psychopathy in patients where that link had broken down, but this is the first study to confirm a connection between the two.
What’s not yet clear is whether the degraded vmPFC link actually causes psychopathy, or if it’s merely correlated with psychopathic behaviors that are caused by some other environmental or genetic factor.
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