A BRAIN IMAGING (SINGLE-PHOTON EMISSION COMPUTERIZED-TOMOGRAPHY) STUDY OF SEMANTIC AND AFFECTIVE PROCESSING IN PSYCHOPATHS

Psychopaths have been described as human predators who use charm, inti midation, and violence to control others and to satisfy their own need s. Underlying their propensity to violate social norms and expectation s is a profound lack of empathy, guilt, or remorse, affective processe s that have long resisted scientific investigation, Using brain imagin g technology we Found that psychopaths differed from nonpsychopaths in the pattern of relative cerebral blood flow, during processing of emo tional words. The results were consistent with the hypothesis that the re are anomalies in the way psychopaths process semantic and affective information. (C) 1997 Society of Biological Psychiatry.