Introduction
The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is a well-studied brain region that has been implicated in a many aspects of emotion and cognition.
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Two studies have observed reduced activity in the dorsal ACC (Kiehl et al., 2001; Muller et al., 2003), and several studies have found adult psychopathy to be associated with reduced activity in the ventral ACC during a variety of tasks, including affective memory (Kiehl et al., 2001), fear conditioning (Viet et al., 2002; Birbaumer et al., 2005), negative picture viewing (Muller et al., 2003), and defection in the Prisoner's dilemma (Rilling et al., 2007), although see Vollm et al. (2010).
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Functional imaging studies of psychopathy have demonstrated reduced activity in the anterior cingulate, yet
it is unclear whether this region is structurally impaired. In this study, we used structural MRI to examine
whether volumetric differences exist in the anterior cingulate between psychopathic (n=24) and control
(n=24) male participants. We found no group differences in the volume of the anterior cingulate or its
dorsal and ventral subregions. Our findings call into question whether the anterior cingulate is impaired in
psychopathy, or whether previous findings of reduced activity may result from reduced input from other
deficient regions.
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Given its role as a form of relay station of information (Shirtcliff et al., 2009), the ACC is densely connected to regions such as the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), both of which are widely implicated in psychopathy.
Because of this, it is unclear whether findings of reduced ACC activity during emotion-related tasks reflect a deficit within the ACC itself, or whether these findings reflect reduced input from associated regions.
_http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~aglenn/Glenn_PSYN2010.pdf
