Mapping the Psychopathic Brain: Divergent Neuroimaging Findings converge onto a Common Brain Network

Abstract

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by a constellation of interpersonal, affective, lifestyle, and antisocial features. However, its neural underpinnings remain poorly understood because functional neuroimaging studies have produced disparate findings. Here, we tackled this lack of replication by investigating whether peak coordinates of studies on psychopathy could in fact map onto a common functional connectivity network. An updated meta-analysis of 23 functional neuroimaging studies (534 cases vs 594 controls) first revealed no significant regional spatial convergence. However, using functional connectomes of 1,000 healthy participants, we demonstrated that the heterogeneous study findings do indeed converge onto a common brain network with a replicability reaching up to 85.2% across studies. We subsequently showed strong associations between this Psychopathy Network and a lesion network of 17 lesion sites causally linked to antisocial behaviors, as well as its association with neurotransmission systems and genetic markers previously implicated in the pathophysiology of psychopathy. Taken together, our study highlights the importance of examining the neural correlates of psychopathy from a network perspective, which can be validated using a multilevel approach, encompassing neural, genetic and neurochemical data. Ultimately, this approach may pave the way for novel and more personalised treatments.