Ricerc@Sapienza

In the last decade neuroimaging techniques have been broadly used to investigate psychiatric diseases. Whereas conventional magnetic resonance (MR) sequences are generally unrevealing in patients with neurosis or psychosis, functional MR Imaging (fMRI) studies have shown altered activation of brain regions in various psychiatric conditions.
Psychopathy, one of the least understood of mental disorders, is characterized by the failure to develop any sense of moral responsibility and the capability of performing violent or antisocial acts. Advanced MRI techniques may be useful in delineating the neurobiology of psychopathy and in improving the knowledge of this personality disorder.
Previous studies showed that individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits have lower activity in several affect-processing brain areas, particularly the amygdala and the anterior insula, and in regions typically associated with reward processing and cognitive control, including the ventral striatum and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These data suggest that affective-interpersonal and lifestyle-antisocial facets of psychopathy may be associated with different patterns of atypical neural activity, which deserves future investigation. The aim of our project is to perform a multiparametric MR study in criminal psychopaths in order to evaluate morphologic changes in specific brain region involved in this disorder and to assess possible abnormalities in functional connectivity within the brain.This study will include adult male subjects prospectively recruited from a cohort of prison inmates with varying degrees of psychopathy. All subjects will undergo a neurocognitive and psychiatric evaluation.
MRI structural and functional data will be correlated with clinical data in order to assess how morpho-functional change sin the brain relate to the Hare's Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-r), the most widely used clinimetric tool in this domain.