Sutherland Matthew T, Fishbein Diana H
Department of Psychology, Florida International University, Miami, FL, United States.
Translational Research on Adversity and Neurodevelopment, Department of Human Development and Family Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, United States.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2017 Dec 12;11:245. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2017.00245. eCollection 2017.
Higher trait levels of psychopathy have been associated with both a tendency to maintain disadvantageous decision-making strategies and aberrant cortico-limbic neural activity. To explore the neural mechanisms associated with the psychopathy-related propensity to continue selecting risky choices, a non-forensic sample of participants completed a self-report psychopathy questionnaire and two runs of a risky decision-making task during HO positron emission tomography (PET) scanning. In this secondary data analysis study, we leveraged data previously collected to examine the impact of previous drug use on risky decision-making to explore the relations between self-reported psychopathy and behavioral and brain metrics during performance of the Cambridge Decision-Making Task (CDMT), in which volunteers chose between small/likely or large/unlikely potential reward outcomes. Behaviorally, we observed that psychopathy scores were differentially correlated with the percent of risky decisions made in run 1 vs. run 2 of the task. Specifically, higher levels of psychopathy, above and beyond that attributable to drug use or sex, were associated with greater tendencies to make risky selections only in the second half (run 2) of the task. In parallel, psychopathy scores negatively correlated with regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in the right insula and right ventral striatum during run 2 of the CDMT. These exploratory outcomes suggest that greater levels of psychopathy may be associated with an inability to translate experience with negative outcomes into behavioral adaptations possibly due to decreased neural efficiency in regions related to somatic and/or reward feedback processes.
较高水平的精神病态特质与维持不利决策策略的倾向以及异常的皮质-边缘神经活动都有关联。为了探究与精神病态相关的持续选择风险选项倾向有关的神经机制，一组非法医样本的参与者完成了一份自我报告的精神病态问卷，并在正电子发射断层扫描（PET）期间进行了两轮风险决策任务。在这项二次数据分析研究中，我们利用先前收集的数据来检验既往药物使用对风险决策的影响，以探究在剑桥决策任务（CDMT）执行过程中自我报告的精神病态与行为和脑指标之间的关系，在该任务中志愿者要在小/可能或大/不太可能的潜在奖励结果之间做出选择。在行为方面，我们观察到精神病态得分与任务第一轮和第二轮中做出的风险决策百分比存在差异相关性。具体而言，除了药物使用或性别因素导致的精神病态水平外，更高水平的精神病态仅与在任务的后半部分（第二轮）做出风险选择的更大倾向相关。同时，在CDMT的第二轮中，精神病态得分与右侧脑岛和右侧腹侧纹状体的局部脑血流量（rCBF）呈负相关。这些探索性结果表明，更高水平的精神病态可能与无法将负面结果的经验转化为行为适应有关，这可能是由于与躯体和/或奖励反馈过程相关区域的神经效率降低所致。
