Amygdala reactivity and negative emotionality: divergent correlates of antisocial personality and psychopathy traits in a community sample.
Journal Article (Journal Article)
Previous studies have emphasized that antisocial personality disorder (APD) and psychopathy overlap highly but differ critically in several features, notably negative emotionality (NEM) and possibly amygdala reactivity to social signals of threat and distress. Here we examined whether dimensions of psychopathy and APD correlate differentially with NEM and amygdala reactivity to emotional faces. Testing these relationships among healthy individuals, dimensions of psychopathy and APD were generated by the profile matching technique of Lynam and Widiger (2001), using facet scales of the NEO Personality Inventory-Revised, and amygdala reactivity was measured using a well-established emotional faces task, in a community sample of 103 men and women. Higher psychopathy scores were associated with lower NEM and lower amygdala reactivity, whereas higher APD scores were related to greater NEM and greater amygdala reactivity, but only after overlapping variance in APD and psychopathy was adjusted for in the statistical model. Amygdala reactivity did not mediate the relationship of APD and psychopathy scores to NEM. Supplemental analyses also compared other measures of factors within psychopathy in predicting NEM and amygdala reactivity and found that Factor 2 psychopathy was positively related to NEM and amygdala reactivity across measures of psychopathy. The overall findings replicate seminal observations on NEM in psychopathy by Hicks and Patrick (2006) and extend this work to neuroimaging in a normative population. They also suggest that one critical way in which APD and psychopathy dimensions may differ in their etiology is through their opposing levels of NEM and amygdala reactivity to threat.
Full Text
Duke Authors
Cited Authors
- Hyde, LW; Byrd, AL; Votruba-Drzal, E; Hariri, AR; Manuck, SB
Published Date
- February 2014
Published In
Volume / Issue
- 123 / 1
Start / End Page
- 214 - 224
PubMed ID
- 24661171
Pubmed Central ID
- PMC4008968
Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)
- 1939-1846
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
- 0021-843X
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
- 10.1037/a0035467
Language
- eng