Cognitive psychology

Neuroscience

Injury prevention

Social psychology

Cognition

Neural correlates of consciousness

Environmental health

Psychopathy

Poison control

Psychology

Antisocial personality disorder

Medicine

Personality

Molecular Psychiatry

Neuroimaging studies have used classic moral dilemmas to identify the neural circuitry underlying moral decision-making in healthy individuals, but it is unknown how this circuit functions in immoral, psychopathic individuals. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we find that more psychopathic individuals showed reduced activity in the amygdala during emotional moral decision-making, with particularly conning and manipulative individuals showing reduced activity in the entire moral neural circuit. These results provide initial evidence that psychopaths exhibit deficits in brain regions essential to moral judgment in normal individuals. Psychopathy is a personality disorder involving severe disruption in moral behavior accompanied by pronounced deficits in emotion. Emotion is argued to be a critical component of moral behavior 1 . Highly emotional moral dilemmas have been found to evoke activity in the amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate, and angular gyrus 1,2 . It has been hypothesized that persistent immoral behavior may result from deficiencies in some components of the moral neural circuit 3 . We implemented a twice-replicated fMRI task involving classic moral dilemmas 1,2 to examine the relationship between psychopathy and brain activity. We also examined whether four different factors of psychopathy (Fig. 1, middle) were differentially related to neural activation during moral decision-making.

The neural correlates of moral decision-making in psychopathy