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

Researchers studied brain activity in men with autism, men with psychopathic traits, and typical men while they looked at emotional faces and heard emotional sounds. Both autism and psychopathy showed different brain responses compared to typical men, but the differences were more severe in psychopathy. This helps explain why both groups may have social difficulties, but only psychopathy is linked to antisocial behavior.

This neuroimaging study compared brain responses to emotional expressions in 19 incarcerated males with high psychopathic traits, 20 males with high-functioning autism, and 19 healthy controls. Participants viewed dynamic facial expressions (happy, angry, disgusted) and listened to emotional sounds (laughter, crying) during fMRI scanning. Results showed psychopathy was associated with reduced somatomotor responses to almost all emotional expressions, while autism showed less pronounced and emotion-specific alterations in somatomotor areas. The findings suggest both conditions involve disrupted brain networks for socioemotional processing, but psychopathy demonstrates more severe functional alterations than autism.

Findings suggest autism and psychopathy involve distinct patterns of brain dysfunction in emotional processing. This neurobiological understanding may inform different therapeutic approaches for social difficulties in autism versus criminal justice interventions for psychopathy.

Small sample sizes (19-20 participants per group). Male-only sample limits generalizability. Cross-sectional design prevents causal inferences. Unclear if autism participants had co-occurring conditions that might influence results.

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.