A study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA) has identified new differences in the brains of psychopaths that could explain their dangerous antisocial behavior. Specifically, researchers have found that in these subjects there are fewer connections between neurons in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain responsible for feelings such as empathy and guilt – and the amygdala – the area responsible for feelings of fear and anxiety. .
To reach this conclusion, Joseph Newman and his colleagues worked with 40 inmates in a prison who had committed similar crimes. Half of them had been diagnosed with psychopathy. Examining their brains with two different techniques, diffusion tensile magnetic resonance imaging (DTI) and functional magnetic resonance imaging, they found that in the brains of psychopaths the density of the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala was very low. Their findings have been published in the latest issue of the Journal of Neuroscience .
