Aberrant motor contagion of emotions in psychopathy and high-functioning autism

Abstract

Psychopathy and autism are both associated with aberrant social skills and empathy, yet only psychopaths are markedly antisocial and violent. Here, we compared the functional neural alterations underlying these two groups that both have aberrant empathetic abilities but distinct behavioral phenotypes. We studied 19 incarcerated male offenders with high psychopathic traits, 20 males with high-functioning autism, and 19 age-matched healthy controls. All groups underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while they viewed dynamic happy, angry, and disgusted faces or listened to laughter and crying sounds. Psychopathy was associated with reduced somatomotor responses to almost all expressions, while participants with autism demonstrated less marked and emotion-specific alterations in the somatomotor area. These data suggest that psychopathy and autism involve both common and distinct functional alterations in the brain networks involved in the socioemotional processing. The alterations are more profound in psychopathy, possibly reflecting the more severely disturbed socioemotional brain networks in this population.

Keywords: autism; emotion; motor cortex; psychopathy; sociality.

Fig. 1

Experimental design for the facial expression task A) and vocal expression task B). Color images and videos were used in the facial expression task.

Fig. 2

Brain responses to happy faces and social laughter. A) Responses to happy faces and laughter separately for each group. Hot color indicates activation and cool color indicates deactivation. B) Between-group differences in response to happy faces and laughter. Data are thresholded at P < 0.05 with FDR cluster-level correction. S1 = primary somatosensory cortex, S2 = secondary somatosensory cortex, M1 = primary motor cortex, M2 = supplementary motor area, and PreCu = precuneus.

Fig. 3

Brain responses to angry and disgusted faces. A) Responses to angry and disgusted faces separately for each group. B) Between-group differences in responses to angry and disgusted faces. Data are thresholded at P < 0.05 with FDR cluster-level correction.

Fig. 4

Region-of interest analysis for laughter (A) and angry faces (B). Between group comparisons were conducted using student’s t-test, with significance levels marked: ^*P < 0.05, ^***P < 0.01. motor = combined region of M1, M2, S1, and S2; data involved both hemispheres.