Department of Psychology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC.
Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience, Georgetown University, Washington, DC.
J Pers Disord. 2020 Oct;34(5):628-649. doi: 10.1521/pedi.2020.34.5.628.
Psychopathy is a personality construct characterized by interpersonal callousness, boldness, and disinhibition, traits that vary continuously across the population and are linked to impaired empathic responding to others' distress and suffering. Following suggestions that empathy reflects neural self-other mapping-for example, the similarity of neural responses to experienced and observed pain, measurable at the voxel level-we used a multivoxel approach to assess associations between psychopathy and empathic neural responses to pain. During fMRI scanning, 21 community-recruited participants varying in psychopathy experienced painful pressure stimulation and watched a live video of a stranger undergoing the same stimulation. As total psychopathy, coldheartedness, and self-centered impulsivity increased, multivoxel similarity of vicarious and experienced pain in the left anterior insula decreased, effects that were not observed following an empathy prompt. Our data provide preliminary evidence that psychopathy is characterized by disrupted spontaneous empathic representations of others' pain that may be reduced by instructions to empathize.
精神病态是一种人格结构，其特征是人际关系冷漠、大胆和不受抑制，这些特征在人群中连续变化，与对他人痛苦和苦难的共情反应受损有关。根据同理心反映神经自我-他人映射的建议，例如，对经历和观察到的疼痛的神经反应的相似性，在体素水平上是可测量的，我们使用多体素方法来评估精神病态与同理心对疼痛的神经反应之间的关联。在 fMRI 扫描过程中，21 名来自社区的参与者经历了痛苦的压力刺激，并观看了一名陌生人经历相同刺激的实时视频。随着总精神病态、冷酷无情和以自我为中心的冲动增加，左前岛叶的替代性和体验性疼痛的多体素相似性降低，但在同理心提示后没有观察到这些效应。我们的数据提供了初步证据，表明精神病态的特征是破坏了对他人疼痛的自发同理心表现，而同理心指令可能会减少这种表现。
