Psychopathy

Psychopathy is a developmental disorder associated with increased risk of instrumental and reactive aggression and with chronic and violent antisocial behavior in both youth and adults. Individuals with psychopathy show specific impairments in stimulus-reinforcement learning, emotional processing, and moral decision making. These deficits have been tied to dysfunctional amygdala response and to problems appropriately representing reinforcement expectancies in ventromedial prefrontal cortex. While treatment recommendations are currently sparse, recent work has shown that previous assessments of treatment amenability in this population may have been overly pessimistic.