Mapping the psychopathic brain: Divergent neuroimaging findings converge onto a common brain network

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by a constellation of interpersonal, affective, lifestyle, and antisocial features. Its neural underpinnings remain poorly understood due to the discrepancies in result of functional neuroimaging studies. Here, we tackled this lack of replication by investigating whether heterogeneous peak locations associated with psychopathy could in fact map onto a common functional connectivity network. A coordinate-based meta-analysis of 38 functional neuroimaging studies (40 independent samples) on psychopathy revealed only weak spatial convergence across samples. However, using functional connectomes of 1000 healthy participants, we demonstrated that the heterogeneous findings do indeed map onto a common brain network with a replicability reaching up to 87.5 % across samples. As indicators of convergent validity, we subsequently showed strong associations between this Psychopathy Network and a brain network of 17 lesion sites causally linked to the emergence of antisocial behaviours, as well as psychological processes, neurotransmission systems, and genetic markers that have been previously implicated in the pathophysiology of psychopathy. Taken together, our work highlights the importance of examining the neural correlates of psychopathy from a network perspective, which can be validated using a multilevel approach encompassing psychological, neuropsychological, genetic and neurochemical data. Ultimately, this approach may pave the way for novel and more personalised treatments.