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Few violent offenders with psychopathy learn from punishment

Violent offenders with antisocial personality and psychopathy are less likely to learn from punishment or modify behavior, according to data published in the Lancet Psychiatry.

“When these violent offenders completed neuropsychological tasks, they failed to learn from punishment cues, to change their behavior in the face of changing contingencies, and made poorer quality decisions despite longer periods of deliberation,” Nigel Blackwood, MD, of the department of forensic and neurodevelopmental sciences, Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College in London, said in a press release.

The researchers conducted a case-control functional MRI study of 50 men (aged 20 to 50 years), including 12 violent offenders with antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy, 20 violent offenders with antisocial personality disorder but not psychopathy, and 18 healthy non-offenders.

Offenders with antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy tended to be younger at the time of their first conviction without psychopathy, the researchers wrote. They also found that more offenders had a lifetime diagnosis of alcohol and cocaine dependence compared with non-offenders. Distinct neural mechanisms were observed when researchers considered severe impairment in learning from punishment, according to data.

“We found that the violent offenders with psychopathy, as compared to both the violent offenders without psychopathy and the non-offenders, displayed abnormal responding to punishment within the posterior cingulate and insula when a previously rewarded response was punished. Our previous research had shown abnormalities in the white matter tract connecting these two regions. In contrast, the violent offenders without psychopathy showed brain functioning similar to that of the non-offenders,” Blackwood said in the press release. “These results suggest the violent offenders with psychopathy are characterized by a distinctive organization of the brain network that is used to learn from punishment and from rewards.”

Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.