Department of Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53719, USA.
Mol Psychiatry. 2011 Aug;16(8):792-9. doi: 10.1038/mp.2010.124. Epub 2010 Dec 7.
In recent years, an increasing number of neuroimaging studies have sought to identify the brain anomalies associated with psychopathy. The results of such studies could have significant implications for the clinical and legal management of psychopaths, as well as for neurobiological models of human social behavior. In this article, we provide a critical review of structural and functional neuroimaging studies of psychopathy. In particular, we emphasize the considerable variability in results across studies, and focus our discussion on three methodological issues that could contribute to the observed heterogeneity in study data: (1) the use of between-group analyses (psychopaths vs non-psychopaths) as well as correlational analyses (normal variation in 'psychopathic' traits), (2) discrepancies in the criteria used to classify subjects as psychopaths and (3) consideration of psychopathic subtypes. The available evidence suggests that each of these issues could have a substantial effect on the reliability of imaging data. We propose several strategies for resolving these methodological issues in future studies, with the goal of fostering further progress in the identification of the neural correlates of psychopathy.
近年来，越来越多的神经影像学研究试图确定与精神病态相关的大脑异常。这些研究的结果可能对精神病态者的临床和法律管理，以及对人类社会行为的神经生物学模型具有重要意义。在本文中，我们对精神病态的结构和功能神经影像学研究进行了批判性回顾。特别是，我们强调了研究结果在跨研究中的相当大的可变性，并将我们的讨论集中在三个可能导致研究数据异质性的方法问题上：（1）使用组间分析（精神病态者与非精神病态者）以及相关分析（“精神病态”特征的正常变化），（2）用于将受试者分类为精神病态者的标准的差异，以及（3）考虑精神病态亚型。现有证据表明，这些问题中的每一个都可能对成像数据的可靠性产生重大影响。我们提出了一些策略来解决未来研究中的这些方法问题，以促进在确定精神病态的神经相关性方面取得进一步进展。
