[Emotional processing in patients with a dissocial personality disorder subtype "psychopathy" according to PCL-R]

Functional MRI was used to test the effects of the deficient emotional responsiveness of psychopathic patients on cognitive processes.

We used a Simon-paradigm, in which ten healthy volunteers and ten patients with a diagnosis of "psychopathy" (defined by Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised) have to select their spatially defined responses on the basis of a nonspatial stimuli feature. For the emotion induction pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) were selected. At the beginning and intermediated by the Simon-paradigm blocks of positive, negative or neutral pictures were presented.

Patients with "psychopathy" exhibited untypical activation patterns in amygdala and prefrontal regions during interferences between negative or positive stimulations and cognitive tasks.

These results demonstrated disturbed regulation of emotion-cognition-interaction in "psychopathy" according to PCL-R.