The interplay of attention and emotion: top-down attention modulates amygdala activation in psychopathy. Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci 2013 Dec;13(4):757-70
Date
05/29/2013Pubmed ID
23712665Pubmed Central ID
PMC3806893DOI
10.3758/s13415-013-0172-8Scopus ID
2-s2.0-84883634474 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site) 101 CitationsAbstract
Psychopathic behavior has long been attributed to a fundamental deficit in fear that arises from impaired amygdala function. Growing evidence has demonstrated that fear-potentiated startle (FPS) and other psychopathy-related deficits are moderated by focus of attention, but to date, no work on adult psychopathy has examined attentional modulation of the amygdala or concomitant recruitment of relevant attention-related circuitry. Consistent with previous FPS findings, here we report that psychopathy-related differences in amygdala activation appear and disappear as a function of goal-directed attention. Specifically, decreased amygdala activity was observed in psychopathic offenders only when attention was engaged in an alternative goal-relevant task prior to presenting threat-relevant information. Under this condition, psychopaths also exhibited greater activation in selective-attention regions of the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) than did nonpsychopaths, and this increased LPFC activation mediated psychopathy's association with decreased amygdala activation. In contrast, when explicitly attending to threat, amygdala activation did not differ in psychopaths and nonpsychopaths. This pattern of amygdala activation highlights the potential role of LPFC in mediating the failure of psychopathic individuals to process fear and other important information when it is peripheral to the primary focus of goal-directed attention.
Author List
Larson CL, Baskin-Sommers AR, Stout DM, Balderston NL, Curtin JJ, Schultz DH, Kiehl KA, Newman JPAuthor
Christine Larson PhD Associate Professor in the Psychology department at University of Wisconsin - MilwaukeeMESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold
AdolescentAdult
Amygdala
Antisocial Personality Disorder
Attention
Brain Mapping
Electric Stimulation
Emotions
Humans
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Neural Pathways
Oxygen
Prisoners
Statistics as Topic
Time Factors
Young Adult
