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Weakened amygdala-vmPFC functional connectivity is related to psychopathic traits in low-income men during emerging adulthood

Fri, March 22, 8:00 to 9:30am, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 3, Room 321

Integrative Statement

Introduction
Psychopathy is a complex disorder comprised of extreme personality traits and impulsive-lifestyle and antisocial behaviors that confers significant harm to others and society. Individuals with psychopathy show reduced emotional sensitivity to others’ fear and distress (Blair, 2001), which is hypothesized to develop from impaired reactivity of the amygdala during emotion processing and disruption to the top-down regulatory control of the amygdala by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) (Kiehl et al., 2001). In support of this hypothesis, several studies have identified an association between psychopathy and weakened amygdala-vmPFC functional connectivity. However, these studies have largely been conducted among small samples of incarcerated adults and only employed resting-state functional connectivity (Motzkin et al., 2011) or task-based functional connectivity with paradigms that did not feature facial expressions of emotion (Kiehl et al., 2001). No prior studies have examined amygdala-vmPFC functional connectivity during the processing of facial expressions of emotion during emerging adulthood (a key period for the persistence/desistence of antisocial behavior) with the full dimensional range of psychopathic traits. Thus, the goal of this study was to investigate amygdala-vmPFC functional connectivity during an emotional faces task testing for specificity in the impairment for the processing of fearful faces compared to neutral or angry faces among a low-income, urban sample of men during emerging adulthood.

Methods
Participants were 167 participants from the Pitt Mother & Child Project (PMCP), a longitudinal study of 310 racially diverse boys (52% European-American, 38% African-American, 7% biracial, 3% other; Shaw et al., 2012) recruited in infancy within a low-income, urban setting and followed almost yearly from age 1.5-22. For the current study, assessments included an fMRI scan at the end of adolescence (age 20), a questionnaire to assess psychopathic traits during emerging adulthood (at age 22; Self-Report Psychopathy Short-Form; Neumann et al., 2015), and measures of antisocial behavior and callous-unemotional traits at age 20 to control for continuity in these behaviors across emerging adulthood. During the fMRI task, participants performed an implicit emotional faces processing task.

Results
Overall, we found that the amygdala was significantly negatively functionally connected to the vmPFC during the processing of fearful, angry, and neutral expressions (vs. shapes). Consistent with our hypothesis, weakened negative amygdala-vmPFC functional connectivity was prospectively related to psychopathic traits. This impaired functional connectivity was specific to the processing fearful faces relative to shapes (but not angry or neutral faces) and was over and above expected continuity in psychopathic traits across the period of emerging adulthood (Table 1; Figure 1).

Discussion
The current results provide evidence to support the hypothesis that psychopathic traits are underpinned by poor sensitivity to the fear of others, particularly in how responsivity to these emotions is represented and regulated by frontolimbic neural circuitry during the transition to adulthood. Thus, weakened amygdala-vmPFC functional connectivity during the processing of emotional expressions may represent a neurobiological marker for psychopathic traits across community, clinic, and forensic samples and could be targeted in the future within interventions aimed at preventing the developmental precursors of psychopathy.

Authors