Department of Psychology, Georgetown University Washington, DC, USA.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2013 May 10;7:181. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00181. eCollection 2013.
Psychopathy is a developmental disorder associated with core affective traits, such as low empathy, guilt, and remorse, and with antisocial and aggressive behaviors. Recent neurocognitive and neuroimaging studies of psychopathy in both institutionalized and community samples have begun to illuminate the basis of this condition, in particular the ways that psychopathy affects the experience and recognition of fear. In this review, I will consider how understanding emotional processes in psychopathy can shed light on the three questions central to the study of emotion: (1) Are emotions discrete, qualitatively distinct phenomena, or quantitatively varying phenomena best described in terms of dimensions like arousal and valence? (2) What are the brain structures involved in generating specific emotions like fear, if any? And (3) how do our own experiences of emotion pertain to our perceptions of and responses to others' emotion? I conclude that insights afforded by the study of psychopathy may provide better understanding of not only fundamental social phenomena like empathy and aggression, but of the basic emotional processes that motivate these behaviors.
精神病态是一种与核心情感特质相关的发展障碍，例如共情、内疚和悔恨感低，以及反社会和攻击行为。最近对精神病态的神经认知和神经影像学研究，无论是在机构样本还是社区样本中，都开始阐明这种情况的基础，特别是精神病态如何影响对恐惧的体验和识别。在这篇综述中，我将考虑理解精神病态中的情感过程如何能够阐明情感研究的三个核心问题：（1）情感是离散的、质上不同的现象，还是可以用唤醒和效价等维度来更好地描述的量化变化现象？（2）如果有的话，产生特定情感（如恐惧）的大脑结构是什么？以及（3）我们自己的情感体验与我们对他人情感的感知和反应有何关系？我得出的结论是，对精神病态的研究提供的见解不仅可以更好地理解共情和攻击等基本社会现象，还可以更好地理解激发这些行为的基本情感过程。
