Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-18T21:19:46.320Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Affective and interpersonal psychopathic traits associated with reduced corpus callosum volume among male inmates – RETRACTED

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2018

Nathaniel E. Anderson*
Affiliation:
The Mind Research Network & Lovelace Biomedical and Environmental Research Institute, Albuquerque, NM, USA
J. Michael Maurer
Affiliation:
The Mind Research Network & Lovelace Biomedical and Environmental Research Institute, Albuquerque, NM, USA University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA
Prashanth Nyalakanti
Affiliation:
The Mind Research Network & Lovelace Biomedical and Environmental Research Institute, Albuquerque, NM, USA
Keith A. Harenski
Affiliation:
The Mind Research Network & Lovelace Biomedical and Environmental Research Institute, Albuquerque, NM, USA
Carla L. Harenski
Affiliation:
The Mind Research Network & Lovelace Biomedical and Environmental Research Institute, Albuquerque, NM, USA
Michael R. Koenigs
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA
Jean Decety
Affiliation:
University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
Kent A. Kiehl
Affiliation:
The Mind Research Network & Lovelace Biomedical and Environmental Research Institute, Albuquerque, NM, USA University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA
*
Author for correspondence: Nathaniel E. Anderson, E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

Background

Psychopathy is a personality disorder associated with severe emotional and interpersonal consequences and persistent antisocial behavior. Neurobiological models of psychopathy emphasize impairments in emotional processing, attention, and integration of information across large-scale neural networks in the brain. One of the largest integrative hubs in the brain is the corpus callosum (CC) – a large white matter structure that connects the two cerebral hemispheres.

Method

The current study examines CC volume, measured via Freesurfer parcellation, in a large sample (n = 495) of incarcerated men who were assessed for psychopathic traits using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R).

Results

Psychopathy was associated with reduced volume across all five sub-regions of the CC. These relationships were primarily driven by the affective/interpersonal elements of psychopathy (PCL-R Factor 1), as no significant associations were found between the CC and the lifestyle/antisocial traits of psychopathy. The observed effects were not attributable to differences in substance use severity, age, IQ, or total brain volume.

Conclusions

These findings align with suggestions that core psychopathic traits may be fostered by reduced integrative capacity across large-scale networks in the brain.

Type
Original Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aboitiz, F, Scheibel, AB, Fisher, RS and Zaidel, E (1992) Fiber composition of the human corpus callosum. Brain Research 598, 143153.Google Scholar
Anderson, NE and Kiehl, KA (2012) The psychopath magnetized: insights from brain imaging. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16, 5260.Google Scholar
Anderson, NE, Steele, VR, Maurer, JM, Rao, V, Koenigs, MR, Decety, J, Kosson, DS, Calhoun, VD and Kiehl, KA (2017) Differentiating emotional processing and attention in psychopathy with functional neuroimaging. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience 17, 491515.Google Scholar
Arnone, D, McIntosh, AM, Tan, GMY and Ebmeier, KP (2008) Meta-analysis of magnetic resonance imaging studies of the corpus callosum in schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Research 101, 124132.Google Scholar
Blair, RJR (1995) A cognitive developmental approach to morality: investigating the psychopath. Cognition 57, 129.Google Scholar
Blair, RJR (2001) Neurocognitive models of aggression, the antisocial personality disorders, and psychopathy. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry 71, 727731.Google Scholar
Blair, RJR (2005) Applying a cognitive neuroscience perspective to the disorder of psychopathy. Development and Psychopathology 17, 865891.Google Scholar
Bloom, JS and Hynd, GW (2005) The role of the corpus callosum in interhemispheric transfer of information: excitation or inhibition? Neuropsychology Review 15, 5971.Google Scholar
Buckholtz, JW and Meyer-Lindenberg, A (2012) Psychopathology and the human connectome: toward a transdiagnostic model of risk for mental illness. Neuron 74, 9901004.Google Scholar
Castro-Caldas, A, Miranda, PC, Carmo, I, Reis, A, Leote, F, Ribeiro, C and Ducla-Soares, E (1999) Influence of learning to read and write on the morphology of the corpus callosum. European Journal of Neurology 6, 2328.Google Scholar
Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality (2015) Behavioral Health Trends in the United States: Results from the 2014 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. HHS Publication No. SMA 15-4927, NSDUH Series H-50. Available at http://www.samhsa.gov/data (Accessed 7 March 2018).Google Scholar
Cleckley, H (1976) The Mask of Sanity, 5th Edn. St. Louis: Mosby.Google Scholar
Cowell, PE, Allen, LS, Zalatimo, NS and Denenberg, VH (1992) A developmental study of sex and age interactions in the human corpus callosum. Developmental Brain Research 66, 187192.Google Scholar
Craig, MC, Catani, M, Deeley, Q, Latham, R, Daly, E, Kanaan, R, Picchioni, M, McGuire, PK, Fahy, T and Murphy, DG (2009) Altered connections on the road to psychopathy. Molecular Psychiatry 14, 946953.Google Scholar
Egaas, B, Courchesne, E and Saitoh, O (1995) Reduced size of corpus callosum in autism. Archives of Neurology 52, 794801.Google Scholar
Espinoza, FA, Vergara, VM, Reyes, D, Anderson, N, Harenski, CL, Decety, J, Rachakonda, S, Daramaju, E, Rashid, B, Miller, R, Koenigs, M, Kosson, DS, Harenski, K, Kiehl, KA and Calhoun, VD (2018) Aberrant functional network connectivity in psychopathy from a large (n = 985) forensic sample. Human Brain Mapping 39, 26242634.Google Scholar
First, MB, Spitzer, RL, Gibbon, M and Williams, JBW (2002) Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV-TR Axis I Disorders, Research Version, Patient Edition (SCID-I/P). New York, NY: Biometrics Research, New York State Psychiatric Institute.Google Scholar
Fischl, B (2012) Freesurfer. Neuroimage 62, 774781.Google Scholar
Fischl, B, Salat, DH, Busa, E, Albert, M, Dieterich, M, Haselgrove, C, Van Der Kouwe, A, Killiany, R, Kennedy, D, Klaveness, S and Montillo, A (2002) Whole brain segmentation: automated labeling of neuroanatomical structures in the human brain. Neuron 33, 341355.Google Scholar
Fischl, B, Van Der Kouwe, A, Destrieux, C, Halgren, E, Ségonne, F, Salat, DH, Busa, E, Seidman, LJ, Goldstein, J, Kennedy, D and Caviness, V (2004) Automatically parcellating the human cerebral cortex. Cerebral Cortex 14, 1122.Google Scholar
Friston, KJ (1998) The disconnection hypothesis. Schizophrenia Research 30, 115125.Google Scholar
Gazzaniga, MS (2005) Forty-five years of split-brain research and still going strong. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 6, 653659.Google Scholar
Hamilton, RK, Hiatt Racer, K and Newman, JP (2015) Impaired integration in psychopathy: a unified theory of psychopathic dysfunction. Psychological Review 122, 770791.Google Scholar
Hare, RD (1996) Psychopathy: a clinical construct whose time has come. Criminal Justice and Behavior 23, 2554.Google Scholar
Hare, RD (2003) The Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, 2nd Edn. Toronto: Multi-Health Systems.Google Scholar
Hare, RD and Neumann, CS (2005) Structural models of psychopathy. Current Psychiatry Reports 7, 5764.Google Scholar
Hauser, P, Dauphinais, ID, Berrettini, W, DeLisi, LE, Gelernter, J and Post, RM (1989) Corpus callosum dimensions measured by magnetic resonance imaging in bipolar affective disorder and schizophrenia. Biological Psychiatry 26, 659668.Google Scholar
Hiatt, KD and Newman, JP (2007) Behavioral evidence of prolonged interhemispheric transfer time among psychopathic offenders. Neuropsychology 21, 313318.Google Scholar
Hoppenbrouwers, SS, De Jesus, DR, Sun, Y, Stirpe, T, Hofman, D, McMaster, J, Hughes, G, Daskalakis, ZJ and Schutter, DJ (2014) Abnormal interhemispheric connectivity in male psychopathic offenders. Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience 39, 2230.Google Scholar
Hoppenbrouwers, SS, Bulten, BH and Brazil, IA (2016) Parsing fear: a reassessment of the evidence for fear deficits in psychopathy. Psychological Bulletin 142, 573600.Google Scholar
Jackowski, AP, Douglas-Palumberi, H, Jackowski, M, Win, L, Schultz, RT, Staib, LW, Krystal, JH and Kaufman, J (2008) Corpus callosum in maltreated children with posttraumatic stress disorder: a diffusion tensor imaging study. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging 162, 256261.Google Scholar
Jorgensen, C, Anderson, NE and Barnes, JC (2016) Bad brains: crime and drug abuse from a neurocriminological perspective. American Journal of Criminal Justice 41, 4769.Google Scholar
Kiehl, KA (2006) A cognitive neuroscience perspective on psychopathy: evidence for paralimbic system dysfunction. Psychiatry Research 142, 107128.Google Scholar
Kiehl, KA and Hoffman, MB (2011) The criminal psychopath: history, neuroscience, treatment, and economics. Jurimetrics 51, 355397.Google Scholar
Kiehl, KA, Hare, RD, McDonald, JJ and Brink, J (1999) Semantic and affective processing in psychopaths: an event-related potential (ERP) study. Psychophysiology 36, 765774.Google Scholar
Kiehl, KA, Smith, AM, Mendrek, A, Forster, BB, Hare, RD and Liddle, PF (2004) Temporal lobe abnormalities in semantic processing by criminal psychopaths as revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging 130, 297312.Google Scholar
Korponay, C, Pujara, M, Deming, P, Philippi, C, Decety, J, Kosson, DS, Kiehl, KA and Koenigs, M (2017) Impulsive-antisocial dimension of psychopathy linked to enlargement and abnormal functional connectivity of the striatum. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging 2, 149157.Google Scholar
Liang, M, Zhou, Y, Jiang, T, Liu, Z, Tian, L, Liu, H and Hao, Y (2006) Widespread functional disconnectivity in schizophrenia with resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. Neuroreport 17, 209213.Google Scholar
Lopez, M, Kosson, DS, Weissman, DH and Banich, MT (2007) Interhemispheric integration in psychopathic offenders. Neuropsychology 21, 8293.Google Scholar
Luders, E, Phillips, OR, Clark, K, Kurth, F, Toga, AW and Narr, KL (2012) Bridging the hemispheres in meditation: thicker callosal regions and enhanced fractional anisotropy (FA) in long-term practitioners. Neuroimage 61, 181187.Google Scholar
Ly, M, Motzkin, JC, Philippi, CL, Kirk, GR, Newman, JP, Kiehl, KA and Koenigs, M (2012) Cortical thinning in psychopathy. American Journal of Psychiatry 169, 743749.Google Scholar
Lykken, DT (1995) The Antisocial Personalities. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Menon, V (2011) Large-scale brain networks and psychopathology: a unifying triple network model. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15, 483506.Google Scholar
Miller, MB, Sinnott-Armstrong, W, Young, L, King, D, Paggi, A, Fabri, M, Polonara, G and Gazzaniga, MS (2010) Abnormal moral reasoning in complete and partial callosotomy patients. Neuropsychologia 48, 22152220.Google Scholar
Motzkin, JC, Newman, JP, Kiehl, KA and Koenigs, M (2011) Reduced prefrontal connectivity in psychopathy. Journal of Neuroscience 31, 1734817357.Google Scholar
Nasrallah, HA, McCalley-Whitters, M, Bigelow, LB and Rauscher, FP (1983) A histological study of the corpus callosum in chronic schizophrenia. Psychiatry Research 8, 251260.Google Scholar
Newman, JP and Lorenz, AR (2003) Response modulation and emotion processing: implications for psychopathy and other dysregulatory psychopathology. In Davidson, RJ, Scherer, K and Goldsmith, HH (eds), Handbook of Affective Sciences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 904929.Google Scholar
Newman, JP, Schmitt, WA and Voss, WD (1997) The impact of motivationally neutral cues on psychopathic individuals: assessing the generality of the response modulation hypothesis. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 106, 563575.Google Scholar
Newman, JP, Curtin, JJ, Bertsch, JD and Baskin-Sommers, AR (2010) Attention moderates the fearlessness of psychopathic offenders. Biological Psychiatry 67, 6670.Google Scholar
O'Kusky, J, Strauss, E, Kosaka, B, Wada, J, Li, D, Druhan, M and Petrie, J (1988) The corpus callosum is larger with right-hemisphere cerebral speech dominance. Annals of Neurology 24, 379383.Google Scholar
Oldfield, RC (1971) The assessment and analysis of handedness: the Edinburgh inventory. Neuropsychologia 9, 97113.Google Scholar
Patrick, CJ (1994) Emotion and psychopathy: startling new insights. Psychophysiology 31, 319330.Google Scholar
Philippi, CL, Pujara, MS, Motzkin, JC, Newman, J, Kiehl, KA and Koenigs, M (2015) Altered resting-state functional connectivity in cortical networks in psychopathy. Journal of Neuroscience 35, 60686078.Google Scholar
Pol, HEH, Schnack, HG, Mandl, RC, Cahn, W, Collins, DL, Evans, AC and Kahn, RS (2004) Focal white matter density changes in schizophrenia: reduced inter-hemispheric connectivity. Neuroimage 21, 2735.Google Scholar
Pujol, J, Vendrell, P, Junqué, C, Martí-Vilalta, JL and Capdevila, A (1993) When does human brain development end? Evidence of corpus callosum growth up to adulthood. Annals of Neurology 34, 7175.Google Scholar
Pujol, J, Batalla, I, Contreras-Rodríguez, O, Harrison, BJ, Pera, V, Hernández-Ribas, R, Real, E, Bosa, L, Soriano-Mas, C, Deus, J and López-Sola, M (2011) Breakdown in the brain network subserving moral judgment in criminal psychopathy. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 7, 917923.Google Scholar
Raine, A, Lencz, T, Taylor, K, Hellige, JB, Bihrle, S, Lacasse, L, Lee, M, Ishikawa, S and Colletti, P (2003) Corpus callosum abnormalities in psychopathic antisocial individuals. Archives of General Psychiatry 60, 11341142.Google Scholar
Schlaug, G, Jäncke, L, Huang, Y, Staiger, JF and Steinmetz, H (1995) Increased corpus callosum size in musicians. Neuropsychologia 33, 10471055.Google Scholar
Sheng, T, Gheytanchi, A and Aziz-Zadeh, L (2010) Default network deactivations are correlated with psychopathic personality traits. PLoS ONE 5, e12611.Google Scholar
Smith, SS and Newman, JP (1990) Alcohol and drug abuse-dependence disorders in psychopathic and nonpsychopathic criminal offenders. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 99, 430439.Google Scholar
Tanaka-Arakawa, MM, Matsui, M, Tanaka, C, Uematsu, A, Uda, S, Miura, K, Sakai, T and Noguchi, K (2015) Developmental changes in the corpus callosum from infancy to early adulthood: a structural magnetic resonance imaging study. PLoS ONE 10, e0118760.Google Scholar
Teicher, MH, Dumont, NL, Ito, Y, Vaituzis, C, Giedd, JN and Andersen, SL (2004) Childhood neglect is associated with reduced corpus callosum area. Biological Psychiatry 56, 8085.Google Scholar
van der Knaap, LJ and van der Ham, IJ (2011) How does the corpus callosum mediate interhemispheric transfer? A review. Behavioural Brain Research 223, 211221.Google Scholar
Walsh, Z, Allen, LC and Kosson, DS (2007) Beyond social deviance: substance use disorders and the dimensions of psychopathy. Journal of Personality Disorders 21, 273288.Google Scholar
Wechsler, DA (1997) Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, 3rd ed. San Antonio, TX: The Psychological Corporation.Google Scholar
Witelson, SF (1985) The brain connection: the corpus callosum is larger in left-handers. Science 229, 665668.Google Scholar
Woodruff, PW, McManus, IC and David, AS (1995) Meta-analysis of corpus callosum size in schizophrenia. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry 58, 457461.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Anderson et al. supplementary material

Anderson et al. supplementary material 1

Download Anderson et al. supplementary material(File)
File 35.7 KB