Corpus callosum abnormalities in psychopathic antisocial individuals.

CONTEXT Psychopathic antisocial individuals have previously been characterized by abnormal interhemispheric processing and callosal functioning, but there have been no studies on the structural characteristics of the corpus callosum in this group. OBJECTIVES To assess whether (1) psychopathic individuals with antisocial personality disorder show structural and functional impairments in the corpus callosum, (2) group differences are mirrored by correlations between dimensional measures of callosal structure and psychopathy, (3) callosal abnormalities are associated with affective deficits, and (4) callosal abnormalities are independent of psychosocial deficits. DESIGN Case-control study. SETTING Community sample. PARTICIPANTS Fifteen men with antisocial personality disorder and high psychopathy scores and 25 matched controls, all from a larger sample of 83 community volunteers. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Structural magnetic resonance imaging measures of the corpus callosum (volume estimate of callosal white matter, thickness, length, and genu and splenium area), functional callosal measures (2 divided visual field tasks), electrodermal and cardiovascular activity during a social stressor, personality measures of affective and interpersonal deficits, and verbal and spatial ability. RESULTS Psychopathic antisocial individuals compared with controls showed a 22.6% increase in estimated callosal white matter volume (P<.001), a 6.9% increase in callosal length (P =.002), a 15.3% reduction in callosal thickness (P =.04), and increased functional interhemispheric connectivity (P =.02). Correlational analyses in the larger unselected sample confirmed the association between antisocial personality and callosal structural abnormalities. Larger callosal volumes were associated with affective and interpersonal deficits, low autonomic stress reactivity, and low spatial ability. Callosal abnormalities were independent of psychosocial deficits. CONCLUSIONS Corpus callosum abnormalities in psychopathic antisocial individuals may reflect atypical neurodevelopmental processes involving an arrest of early axonal pruning or increased white matter myelination. These findings may help explain affective deficits and previous findings of abnormal interhemispheric transfer in psychopathic individuals.

[1]  G M Innocenti,et al.  Typology, early differentiation, and exuberant growth of a set of cortical axons , 1999, The Journal of comparative neurology.

[2]  D. Pine,et al.  Verbal dichotic listening in boys at risk for behavior disorders. , 1997, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

[3]  Adrianna Mendrek,et al.  Limbic abnormalities in affective processing by criminal psychopaths as revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging , 2001, Biological Psychiatry.

[4]  A. Raine,et al.  Reduced prefrontal gray matter volume and reduced autonomic activity in antisocial personality disorder. , 2000, Archives of general psychiatry.

[5]  D L Newman,et al.  Behavioral observations at age 3 years predict adult psychiatric disorders. Longitudinal evidence from a birth cohort. , 1996, Archives of general psychiatry.

[6]  Michael F. Green,et al.  Training and quality assurance with the structured clinical interview for DSM-IV (SCID-I/P) , 1998, Psychiatry Research.

[7]  J. Rapoport,et al.  Velocardiofacial syndrome in childhood-onset schizophrenia. , 1999, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

[8]  Jacqueline Spiegel-Cohen,et al.  F]fluorodeoxyglucose Positron Emission Tomography , 1999 .

[9]  M. Seto,et al.  Psychopathy, Treatment Behavior, and Sex Offender Recidivism , 1999 .

[10]  J. Hellige,et al.  Interhemispheric interaction when both hemispheres have access to the same stimulus information. , 1989, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[11]  P. Venables.  Editorials: 1. Psychophysiology and psychiatry , 1971, Psychological Medicine.

[12]  M. Bryden.  Measuring handedness with questionnaires , 1977, Neuropsychologia.

[13]  R. Hare,et al.  Psychopathy and perceptual asymmetry during verbal dichotic listening. , 1984, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[14]  A. Raine,et al.  Structural and functional characteristics of the corpus callosum in schizophrenics, psychiatric controls, and normal controls: A magnetic resonance imaging and neuropsychological evaluation. , 1990 .

[15]  L. Robins.  A 70-year history of conduct disorder: Variations in definition, prevalence, and correlates. , 1999 .

[16]  K. Kalil,et al.  Dynamic behaviors of growth cones extending in the corpus callosum of living cortical brain slices observed with video microscopy , 1994, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[17]  Norman D. Cook,et al.  The Brain Code , 1986 .

[18]  C. Patrick,et al.  Emotionality and Violent Behavior in Psychopaths , 1997 .

[19]  E. Serafetinides,et al.  Schizophrenia, corpus callosum, and interhemispheric communication: A review , 1990, Psychiatry Research.

[20]  Adrian Raine,et al.  The Psychopathology of Crime: Criminal Behavior as a Clinical Disorder , 1993 .

[21]  M. Hillbrand.  Cerebral Lateralization and Aggression. , 1994 .

[22]  Henry A. Nasrallah,et al.  A controlled magnetic resonance imaging study of corpus callosum thickness in schizophrenia , 1986, Biological Psychiatry.

[23]  James R. Evans,et al.  Quantitative EEG Findings Among Men Convicted of Murder , 1997 .

[24]  R. Joynt.  Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain , 1995 .

[25]  Jacob Cohen.  Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences , 1969, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Research Design.

[26]  O. Salonen,et al.  MRI of the brain in the Cohen syndrome: a relatively large corpus callosum in patients with mental retardation and microcephaly. , 1998, Neuropediatrics.

[27]  T. Moffitt.  Adolescence-limited and life-course-persistent antisocial behavior: a developmental taxonomy. , 1993, Psychological review.

[28]  A. Raine,et al.  Autonomic stress reactivity and executive functions in successful and unsuccessful criminal psychopaths from the community. , 2001, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[29]  P. Czobor,et al.  Lateralized abnormality in the EEG of persistently violent psychiatric inpatients , 1991, Biological Psychiatry.

[30]  A. A. Shumskaia.  [Interhemispheric asymmetry of visual evoked potentials in psychopathies]. , 1979, Zhurnal nevropatologii i psikhiatrii imeni S.S. Korsakova.

[31]  Robert B. Lufkin,et al.  Corpus callosum morphometry and dichotic listening performace: Individual differences in functional interhemispheric inhibition? , 1993, Neuropsychologia.

[32]  P. Rakić,et al.  Axon overproduction and elimination in the corpus callosum of the developing rhesus monkey , 1990, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[33]  B. Moore,et al.  Quantitative Morphology of the Corpus Callosum in Children With Neurofibromatosis and Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder , 2000, Journal of child neurology.

[34]  S. Herpertz,et al.  Emotion in criminal offenders with psychopathy and borderline personality disorder. , 2001, Archives of general psychiatry.

[35]  A. A. Shumskaya.  Interhemispheric asymmetry of visual evoked potentials in psychopathies , 1984, Neuroscience and Behavioral Physiology.

[36]  Jacqueline Spiegel-Cohen,et al.  Shape and size of the corpus callosum in schizophrenia and schizotypal personality disorder , 2000, Schizophrenia Research.

[37]  R. Hare,et al.  Psychopathy and cerebral asymmetry in semantic processing , 1988 .

[38]  R. Davidson,et al.  Dysfunction in the neural circuitry of emotion regulation--a possible prelude to violence. , 2000, Science.

[39]  A. Raine.  The SPQ: a scale for the assessment of schizotypal personality based on DSM-III-R criteria. , 1991, Schizophrenia bulletin.

[40]  R. Cadoret,et al.  Genetic-environmental interaction in the genesis of aggressivity and conduct disorders. , 1995, Archives of general psychiatry.

[41]  M. Rice,et al.  Violent offender research and implications for the criminal justice system. , 1997, The American psychologist.

[42]  D. Delis,et al.  Visuospatial functioning before and after commissurotomy. Disconnection in hierarchical processing. , 1988, Archives of neurology.

[43]  Jagath C. Rajapakse,et al.  Development of the human corpus callosum during childhood and adolescence: A longitudinal MRI study , 1999, Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry.

[44]  R. Hare,et al.  Psychopathy and physiological activity during anticipation of an adversive stimulus in a distraction paradigm. , 1982, Psychophysiology.

[45]  D. Cooke,et al.  Refining the construct of psychopathy: towards a hierarchical model. , 2001, Psychological assessment.

[46]  S. Mednick,et al.  Spatial but not verbal cognitive deficits at age 3 years in persistently antisocial individuals , 2002, Development and Psychopathology.

[47]  T. Turkington,et al.  Brain Morphological Changes and Early Marijuana Use , 2000, Journal of addictive diseases.

[48]  Alan C. Evans,et al.  Growth patterns in the developing brain detected by using continuum mechanical tensor maps , 2000, Nature.

[49]  E. Zaidel,et al.  Anatomical-behavioral relationships: Corpus callosum morphometry and hemispheric specialization , 1994, Behavioural Brain Research.

[50]  Nora D. Volkow,et al.  Brain glucose metabolism in violent psychiatric patients: a preliminary study , 1995, Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.

[51]  Stephen D. Hart,et al.  The revised Psychopathy Checklist: Reliability and factor structure. , 1990 .

[52]  C. Patrick.  Emotional Processes in Psychopathy , 2001 .

[53]  D. Lynam.  Early identification of chronic offenders: who is the fledgling psychopath? , 1996, Psychological bulletin.

[54]  A. B. Hollingshead,et al.  Four factor index of social status , 1975 .

[55]  Individual variation in hemispheric asymmetry: multitask study of effects related to handedness and sex. , 1994, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[56]  M S Buchsbaum,et al.  Magnetic resonance and positron emission tomography imaging of the corpus callosum: size, shape and metabolic rate in unipolar depression. , 1993, Journal of affective disorders.

[57]  M. First,et al.  Structured clinical interview for DSM-IV axis II personality disorders : SCID-II , 1997 .

[58]  B. Moore,et al.  Brain volume in children with neurofibromatosis type 1 , 2000, Neurology.

[59]  Jagath C. Rajapakse,et al.  Quantitative magnetic resonance imaging of the corpus callosum in childhood onset schizophrenia , 1997, Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.

[60]  R. Ashton,et al.  Agenesis of the Corpus Callosum: Report of Two Pre‐school Children and Review of the Literature , 1978, Developmental medicine and child neurology.

[61]  A. Toga,et al.  Mapping morphology of the corpus callosum in schizophrenia. , 2000, Cerebral cortex.

[62]  F. Robichon,et al.  Abnormal Callosal Morphology in Male Adult Dyslexics: Relationships to Handedness and Phonological Abilities , 1998, Brain and Language.

[63]  John J McDonald,et al.  Reduced P300 responses in criminal psychopaths during a visual oddball task , 1999, Biological Psychiatry.

[64]  L. Jäncke,et al.  Corpus callosum size in children with developmental language disorder. , 2000, Brain research. Cognitive brain research.

[65]  L. Saugstad.  The maturational theory of brain development and cerebral excitability in the multifactorially inherited manic-depressive psychosis and schizophrenia. , 1994, International journal of psychophysiology : official journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology.

[66]  N L Segal,et al.  Personality similarity in twins reared apart and together. , 1988, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[67]  L. Costa.  Hemispheric communication: Mechanisms and models , 1997 .

[68]  A. Raine,et al.  Reduced lateralization in verbal dichotic listening in adolescent psychopaths. , 1990, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[69]  Joseph B. Hellige,et al.  Relationships between Brain Morphology and Behavioral Measures of Hemispheric Asymmetry and Interhemispheric Interaction , 1998, Brain and Cognition.

[70]  K. Partanen,et al.  Brain perfusion SPECT and MRI in foetal alcohol syndrome , 1999, Developmental medicine and child neurology.

[71]  R. Day,et al.  Anomalous perceptual asymmetries for negative emotional stimuli in the psychopath. , 1996, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[72]  R. Spitzer.  Dsm-IV Casebook: A Learning Companion to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition , 1994 .

[73]  P. Bentler,et al.  Cognition and the corpus callosum: verbal fluency, visuospatial ability, and language lateralization related to midsagittal surface areas of callosal subregions. , 1992, Behavioral neuroscience.

[74]  W. Brown,et al.  Cognitive and psychosocial deficits in agenesis of the corpus callosum with normal intelligence , 2000 .

[75]  Hannu J. Aronen,et al.  Psychopathy and the posterior hippocampus , 2001, Behavioural Brain Research.

[76]  A. Belger,et al.  Interhemispheric processing in left- and right-handers. , 1990, The International journal of neuroscience.

[77]  A. Damasio.  Descartes' error: emotion, reason, and the human brain. avon books , 1994 .

[78]  R. Thisted,et al.  Brain SPECT findings and aggressiveness. , 1996, Annals of clinical psychiatry : official journal of the American Academy of Clinical Psychiatrists.

[79]  Adrian Raine,et al.  Brain abnormalities in murderers indicated by positron emission tomography , 1997, Biological Psychiatry.

[80]  R. Hare,et al.  A brain imaging (single photon emission computerized tomography) study of semantic and affective processing in psychopaths , 1997, Biological Psychiatry.

[81]  David S. Kosson,et al.  A new method for assessing the interpersonal behavior of psychopathic individuals: Preliminary validation studies. , 1997 .