Carla L. Harenski

Neuroprediction of future rearrest

Identification of factors that predict recurrent antisocial behavior is integral to the social sciences, criminal justice procedures, and the effective treatment of high-risk individuals. Here we show that error-related brain activity elicited during performance of an inhibitory task prospectively predicted subsequent rearrest among adult offenders within 4 y of release (N = 96). The odds that an offender with relatively low anterior cingulate activity would be rearrested were approximately double that of an offender with high activity in this region, holding constant other observed risk factors. These results suggest a potential neurocognitive biomarker for persistent antisocial behavior.

Neuroticism and psychopathy predict brain activation during moral and nonmoral emotion regulation

Functional neuroimaging has identified brain regions associated with voluntary regulation of emotion, including the prefrontal cortex and amygdala. The neural mechanisms underlying individual differences in emotion regulation have not been extensively studied. We investigated the neural correlates of neuroticism and psychopathic personality traits in the context of an emotion regulation task. Results showed that amygdala activity elicited by unpleasant pictures was positively correlated with neuroticism and negatively correlated with a specific psychopathic trait related to emotional underreactivity. During active attempts to decrease emotional responses to unpleasant pictures, superior and ventrolateral prefrontal activity was positively correlated with psychopathy, but not with neuroticism. In contrast, dorsolateral prefrontal activity was positively correlated with neuroticism, but not with psychopathy. Psychopathy was also negatively correlated with medial prefrontal activity in response to pictures depicting moral violations, suggesting reduced emotional responses to moral stimuli in individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits. These results demonstrate dissociable influences of different personality traits on neural activity associated with responses to emotional stimuli and on the recruitment of regulation-related brain activity during the active down-regulation of responses to negative emotional stimuli. These results have implications for the etiology of trait-based psychopathology involving emotional dysregulation.

Gender differences in neural mechanisms underlying moral sensitivity

Researchers have proposed that females and males differ in the structure of their moral attitudes, such that females tend to adopt care-based moral evaluations and males tend to adopt justice-based moral evaluations. The existence of these gender differences remains a controversial issue, as behavioral studies have reported mixed findings. The current study investigated the neural correlates of moral sensitivity in females and males, to test the hypothesis that females would show increased activity in brain regions associated with care-based processing (posterior and anterior cingulate, anterior insula) relative to males when evaluating moral stimuli, and males would show increased activity in regions associated with justice-based processing (superior temporal sulcus) relative to females. Twenty-eight participants (14 females) were scanned using fMRI while viewing unpleasant pictures, half of which depicted moral violations, and rated each picture on the degree of moral violation that they judged to be present. As predicted, females showed a stronger modulatory relationship between posterior cingulate and insula activity during picture viewing and subsequent moral ratings relative to males. Males showed a stronger modulatory relationship between inferior parietal activity and moral ratings relative to females. These results are suggestive of gender differences in strategies utilized in moral appraisals.

Increased Frontotemporal Activation During Pain Observation in Sexual Sadism: Preliminary Findings

CONTEXT Sexual sadism is a psychiatric disorder in which sexual pleasure is derived from inflicting pain, suffering, or humiliation on others. While the psychological and forensic aspects of sexual sadism have been well characterized, little is known about the neurocognitive circuitry associated with the disorder. Sexual sadists show increased peripheral sexual arousal when observing other individuals in pain. The neural mechanisms underlying this unusual response are not well understood. We predicted that sadists relative to nonsadists would show increased responses in brain regions associated with sexual arousal (amygdala, hypothalamus, and ventral striatum) and affective pain processing (anterior cingulate and anterior insula) during pain observation. OBJECTIVE To study the neural correlates of pain observation in sadists and nonsadists. DESIGN Case-control cross-sectional study. Sadists and nonsadists viewed 50 social scenes, 25 that depicted a person in pain (eg, one person stabbing another persons hand with scissors) and 25 thematically matched no-pain pictures (eg, one person stabbing a table with scissors, with another persons hand nearby). Pain severity ratings (range, 0 [none] to 4 [severe]) were acquired following each picture presentation. SETTING Sand Ridge Secure Treatment Center, Mauston, Wisconsin. PARTICIPANTS Fifteen violent sexual offenders, including 8 sadists and 7 nonsadists (defined using the Severe Sexual Sadism Scale) who were matched for age, IQ, and education. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Hemodynamic response revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging and pain severity ratings. RESULTS Sadists relative to nonsadists showed greater amygdala activation when viewing pain pictures. They also rated pain pictures higher on pain severity than nonsadists. Sadists but not nonsadists showed a positive correlation between pain severity ratings and activity in the anterior insula. CONCLUSION These results provide neurobehavioral evidence of unusually heightened sensitivity to the pain of others in sadists.

Neural correlates of moral and non-moral emotion in female psychopathy

This study presents the first neuroimaging investigation of female psychopathy in an incarcerated population. Prior studies have found that male psychopathy is associated with reduced limbic and paralimbic activation when processing emotional stimuli and making moral judgments. The goal of this study was to investigate whether these findings extend to female psychopathy. During fMRI scanning, 157 incarcerated and 46 non-incarcerated female participants viewed unpleasant pictures, half which depicted moral transgressions, and neutral pictures. Participants rated each picture on moral transgression severity. Psychopathy was assessed using the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) in all incarcerated participants. Non-incarcerated participants were included as a control group to derive brain regions of interest associated with viewing unpleasant vs. neutral pictures (emotion contrast), and unpleasant pictures depicting moral transgressions vs. unpleasant pictures without moral transgressions (moral contrast). Regression analyses in the incarcerated group examined the association between PCL-R scores and brain activation in the emotion and moral contrasts. Results of the emotion contrast revealed a negative correlation between PCL-R scores and activation in the right amygdala and rostral anterior cingulate. Results of the moral contrast revealed a negative correlation between PCL-R scores and activation in the right temporo-parietal junction. These results indicate that female psychopathy, like male psychopathy, is characterized by reduced limbic activation during emotion processing. In contrast, reduced temporo-parietal activation to moral transgressions has been less observed in male psychopathy. These results extend prior findings in male psychopathy to female psychopathy, and reveal aberrant neural responses to morally-salient stimuli that may be unique to female psychopathy.

Socioemotional processing of morally-laden behavior and their consequences on others in forensic psychopaths

A large body of evidence supports the view that psychopathy is associated with anomalous emotional processing, reduced guilt and empathy, which are important risk factors for criminal behaviors. However, the precise nature and specificity of this atypical emotional processing is not well understood, including its relation to moral judgment. To further our understanding of the pattern of neural response to perceiving and evaluating morally‐laden behavior, this study included 155 criminal male offenders with various level of psychopathy, as assessed with the Psychopathy Check List‐Revised. Participants were scanned while viewing short clips depicting interactions between two individuals resulting in either interpersonal harm or interpersonal assistance. After viewing each clip, they were asked to identify the emotions of the protagonists. Inmates with high levels of psychopathy were more accurate than controls in successfully identifying the emotion of the recipient of both helpful and harmful actions. Significant hemodynamic differences were detected in the posterior superior temporal sulcus, amygdala, insula, ventral striatum, and prefrontal cortex when individuals with high psychopathy viewed negative versus positive scenarios moral scenarios and when they evaluated the emotional responses of the protagonists. These findings suggest that socioemotional processing abnormalities in psychopathy may be somewhat more complicated than merely a general or specific emotional deficit. Rather, situation‐specific evaluations of the mental states of others, in conjunction with sensitivity to the nature of the other (victim vs. perpetrator), modulate attention to emotion‐related cues. Such atypical processing likely impacts moral decision‐making and behavior in psychopaths. Hum Brain Mapp 36:2015–2026, 2015.

Neural development of mentalizing in moral judgment from adolescence to adulthood

The neural mechanisms underlying moral judgment have been extensively studied in healthy adults. How these mechanisms evolve from adolescence to adulthood has received less attention. Brain regions that have been consistently implicated in moral judgment in adults, including the superior temporal cortex and prefrontal cortex, undergo extensive developmental changes from adolescence to adulthood. Thus, their role in moral judgment may also change over time. In the present study, 51 healthy male participants age 13–53 were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they viewed pictures that did or did not depict situations considered by most individuals to represent moral violations, and rated their degree of moral violation severity. Consistent with predictions, a regression analysis revealed a positive correlation between age and hemodynamic activity in the temporo-parietal junction when participants made decisions regarding moral severity.This region is known to contribute to mentalizing processes during moral judgment in adults and suggests that adolescents use these types of inferences less during moral judgment than do adults. A positive correlation with age was also present in the posterior cingulate. Overall, the results suggest that the brain regions utilized in moral judgment change over development.

Neural processing of moral violations among incarcerated adolescents with psychopathic traits

Graphical abstract

A large scale (N=102) functional neuroimaging study of error processing in a Go/NoGo task

We report a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of 102 healthy participants who completed a demanding Go/NoGo task. The primary purpose of this study was to delineate the neural systems underlying responses to errors in a large sample. We identified a number of regions engaged during error processing including the anterior cingulate, left lateral prefrontal areas and bilateral inferior frontal gyrus, and the subthalamic nucleus. The power afforded by the large cohort enabled identification of regions not consistently measured during Go/NoGo tasks thus helping to incrementally refine our understanding of the neural correlates of error processing. With the present fMRI results, in combination with our previous exploration of response inhibition (Steele et al.), we outline a comprehensive set of regions associated with both response inhibition and error processing.

Glucose Administration Enhances fMRI Brain Activation and Connectivity Related to Episodic Memory Encoding for Neutral and Emotional Stimuli.

Glucose enhances memory in a variety of species. In humans, glucose administration enhances episodic memory encoding, although little is known regarding the neural mechanisms underlying these effects. Here we examined whether elevating blood glucose would enhance functional MRI (fMRI) activation and connectivity in brain regions associated with episodic memory encoding and whether these effects would differ depending on the emotional valence of the material. We used a double-blind, within-participants, crossover design in which either glucose (50g) or a saccharin placebo were administered before scanning, on days approximately 1 week apart. We scanned healthy young male participants with fMRI as they viewed emotionally arousing negative pictures and emotionally neutral pictures, intermixed with baseline fixation. Free recall was tested at 5 min after scanning and again after 1 day. Glucose administration increased activation in brain regions associated with successful episodic memory encoding. Glucose also enhanced activation in regions whose activity was correlated with subsequent successful recall, including the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and other regions, and these effects differed for negative vs. neutral stimuli. Finally, glucose substantially increased functional connectivity between the hippocampus and amygdala and a network of regions previously implicated in successful episodic memory encoding. These findings fit with evidence from nonhuman animals indicating glucose modulates memory by selectively enhancing neural activity in brain regions engaged during memory tasks. Our results highlight the modulatory effects of glucose and the importance of examining both regional changes in activity and functional connectivity to fully characterize the effects of glucose on brain function and memory.