Limbic abnormalities in affective processing by criminal psychopaths as revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging

Background: Psychopathy is a complex personality disorder of unknown etiolo gy. Central to the disorder are anomalies or difficulties in affective proc essing. Methods: Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to elucidate the ne urobiological correlates of these anomalies in criminal psychopaths during performance of an affective memory task. Results: Compared with criminal nonpsychopaths and noncriminal control part icipants, criminal psychopaths showed significantly less affect-related act ivity in the amygdala/hippocampal formation, parahippocampal gyrus, ventral striatum, and in the anterior and posterior cingulate gyri. Psychopathic c riminals also showed evidence of overactivation in the bilateral fronto-tem poral cortex for processing affective stimuli. Conclusions: These data suggest that the affective abnormalities so often o bserved in psychopathic offenders may be linked to deficient or weakened in put from limbic structures. (C) 2001 Society of Biological Psychiatry.