Analysis Of Differential Amygdala Activity: Affective Processing

Differential Amygdala Activity: Affective Processing
Based on the theory that psychopathy would go along with abnormalities in affective, or emotional, processing due to the fact psychopaths display emotional abnormalities such as lack of empathy, research was conducted in 2001 to find out more about the neural underpinnings of this (Kiehl et al., 2001). To study this, participants underwent fMRI while performing an affective memory task. Eight repetitions of twelve words were carried out, four containing negative words and the other four neutral ones. The participants were not made aware of this distinction. To exclude the possibility of criminality being the factor that influenced brain activity, the participants were divided into three groups:
This applies to different aspects, such as the volume and the activity of the amygdala. Specifically, psychopaths were found to have lower amygdala volume than healthy individuals, even when other factors such as the volume of the entire brain, substance dependence and socioeconomic status were controlled for. Of course, this does not exclude the possibility that another factor could cause or significantly contribute to the lower amygdala volume in the psychopath group. Besides this, the amygdala of psychopaths had some deformities that were not present in the healthy control group. More research could be done on the causes of the deformities, for example, whether they are present at birth or develop over the course of a psychopath’s life. There have also been several studies that have looked into the activity of the amygdala of a psychopath and how this might differ from healthy individuals. Although there are some contradicting findings, with some research claiming lower activity in the amygdala while other researchers have found higher levels of activity in psychopaths, most research seems to suggest lower levels of activity during tasks related to processes involving fear or other emotions. Considering some of the characteristics of psychopaths, lower levels of activity in the amygdala, the brain region responsible for fear processing, would make a lot of sense, as in general, psychopaths have trouble experiencing fear themselves and recognizing it in others. However, a lot more research has to be done, as the research that showed higher levels of amygdala activity during fear conditioning is not the only study that has linked psychopathy to higher amygdala activity. Another study used pictures with emotional imagery to study brain activation and found that in psychopaths the right amygdala showed more activity than it did in healthy individuals