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Voxel-based analysis: reduced gray matter volumes in antisocial offenders with borderline personality disorder (ASPD- BPD) compared to healthy male participants (CON). Note: Upper row reduced gray matter volumes in ASPD-BPD as percent volume reductions compared to CON. Voxel-wise effects are displayed on left, ventral, right and posterior and midsaggital views of the reference template. Volume reductions are color coded from blue (-10 %) to red (-25 %). Lower rows Statistical significance of
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Studies on structural abnormalities in antisocial individuals have reported inconsistent results, possibly due to inhomogeneous samples, calling for an investigation of brain alterations in psychopathologically stratified subgroups. We explored structural differences between antisocial offenders with either borderline personality disorder (ASPD-BPD...
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Citations
... Structural deficits in the temporal lobe were also found in individuals with psychopathy or antisocial behavioral problems [57,58]. For instance, Bertsch et al. found a decreased GMV of TP in violent patients with borderline personality disorder compared with healthy individuals [59]. The TP is the most rostral part of the temporal lobe, which is involved in the modulation of the ventral stream [60] and is considered to be associated with face processing [61], and processing of emotional cues associated with stimuli of various modalities [62,63]. ...
Background
Violence in schizophrenia (SCZ) is a phenomenon associated with neurobiological factors. However, the neural mechanisms of violence in patients with SCZ are not yet sufficiently understood. Thus, this study aimed to explore the structural changes associated with the high risk of violence and its association with impulsiveness in patients with SCZ to reveal the possible neurobiological basis.
Method
The voxel-based morphometry approach and whole-brain analyses were used to measure the alteration of gray matter volume (GMV) for 45 schizophrenia patients with violence (VSC), 45 schizophrenia patients without violence (NSC), and 53 healthy controls (HC). Correlation analyses were used to examine the association of impulsiveness and brain regions associated with violence.
Results
The results demonstrated reduced GMV in the right insula within the VSC group compared with the NSC group, and decreased GMV in the right temporal pole and left orbital part of superior frontal gyrus only in the VSC group compared to the HC group. Spearman correlation analyses further revealed a positive correlation between impulsiveness and GMV of the left superior temporal gyrus, bilateral insula and left medial orbital part of the superior frontal gyrus in the VSC group.
Conclusion
Our findings have provided further evidence for structural alterations in patients with SCZ who had engaged in severe violence, as well as the relationship between the specific brain alterations and impulsiveness. This work provides neural biomarkers and improves our insight into the neural underpinnings of violence in patients with SCZ.
... Among the studies that investigated GM of the cerebellum in aggression and psychopathy, volumetric reductions of the cerebellar hemispheres are among the most consistently reported findings. Compared with HC, violent offenders with psychopathic traits were shown to have lower GM volumes in the left anterior cerebellum and right posterior lobule VIIIb [21,22]. Moreover, the presence and severity of psychopathic traits in violent offenders have been associated with reduced absolute and relative GM volumes in bilateral posterior cerebellum [22][23][24]. ...
... In addition, the presence of other comorbidities may also contribute to explaining structural cerebellar abnormalities. Comorbid bipolar disorder, for example, has been associated with lower GM volume in right Crus II compared with violent offenders with ASPD, and lower GM volume in anterior vermis and left Crus II/lobule VIIb compared with controls [21]. In another study, schizophrenic patients with a history of violent offenses were compared with nonviolent schizophrenic patients [60]. ...
... Moreover, patients with cerebellar lesions or malformations have shown emotion dysregulation, impulsivity, blunted affect and aggression (e.g., Cosme-Cruz et al., 2022;Hoche et al., 2018;Levisohn et al., 2000;Schmahmann & Sherman, 1998;Schutter et al., 2021;Tessier et al., 2015;Tonna et al., 2014). Furthermore, grey matter volumetry and voxel-based morphometry studies using structural neuroimaging have found that psychiatric and neurological patients who display high levels of aggression, impulsivity and anger showed structural abnormalities in the vermis De Brito et al., 2009;Huebner et al., 2008;Kuhlmann et al., 2013;Lee et al., 2011;Leutgeb et al., 2015) or bilateral posterior lobules (e.g., Bertsch et al., 2013;Coccaro et al., 2016;Okada et al., 2015;Puri et al., 2008;Soloff et al., 2008;Zhang et al., 2019;Zhang et al., 2018). These findings are complemented by research in healthy volunteers, where reduced grey matter volumes in the right posterior lobe were associated with higher aggression scores and increased vermal grey matter volumes were linked to higher impulsivity scores Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/imag/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/imag_a_00044/2182232/imag_a_00044.pdf by guest on 22 November 2023 (Wolfs et al., 2023a). ...
Increasing empirical evidence points towards the involvement of the cerebellum in anger and aggressive behaviour. However, human functional neuroimaging studies so far have emphasized the involvement of subcortical and cortical regions, rather than examining the contributions of the cerebellum. In the present study, 7T fMRI was used to assess cerebellar activation during provocation and aggressive behaviour elicited by the Point Subtraction Aggression Paradigm in twenty-nine healthy adult volunteers. Provocations resulted in left posterior cerebellar activation, while right posterior cerebellar activation was associated with aggressive behaviour. Our findings confirm the involvement of distinct and lateralised non-motor related cerebellar areas during provocation and aggressive behaviour. This study adds to the growing recognition of the posterior cerebellar regions in emotion- and cognition-dedicated processes and to the role of the little brain in human aggression.
... Most previous studies on aggressive/violent behavior have been conducted with psychiatric patients, e.g., participants with schizophrenia (Hoptman and Antonius 2011;Fjellvang et al. 2018), borderline personality disorder (Bertsch et al. 2013), bipolar disorder (Soloff et al. 2014), APD (Hoptman 2003;Wahlund and Kristiansson 2009), or incarcerated/forensic participants with Psychopathy (Koenigs 2012;Johanson et al. 2020), and youths/adolescents with disruptive behavior disorder (Baker et al. 2015). Despite the extensive database, this approach presents several methodological challenges. ...
... Another critical issue is the heterogeneity of current studies in terms of inclusion and exclusion criteria. Often, diagnoses are not clearly differentiated: some studies examine patients with psychopathy (Howner et al. 2012), APD (Kumari et al. 2014), or both diagnoses (Bertsch et al. 2013), while others examine violent individuals in general (Hofhansel et al. 2020). Some studies examine convicted offenders (Verdejo-Román et al. 2019), sometimes with recording of psychopathic traits (Ermer et al. 2012), while others examine un-convicted subjects with psychopathic traits (Pardini et al. 2014). ...
... Some other studies report conflicting results regarding GM volume/ concentration reductions associated with aggressiveness: GM volume reductions in the right superior frontal gyrus have been associated with antisocial behavior (Hofhansel et al. 2020), whereas a negative correlation between GM volume in the left superior medial frontal gyrus and hostility was found in violent patients with schizophrenia (Liu et al. 2020a). For the precuneus/posterior cingulate gyrus area, a reduction in GM volume has been described in subjects with (APD and) psychopathy (Bertsch et al. 2013;Contreras-Rodriguez et al. 2015) and in violent patients with schizophrenia (Kuroki et al. 2017), and a reduction in GM density has been found in male violent offenders with psychopathy (Boccardi et al. 2011). ...
Aggression occurs across the population ranging on a symptom continuum. Most previous studies have used magnetic resonance imaging in clinical/forensic samples, which is associated with several confounding factors. The present study examined structural brain characteristics in two healthy samples differing only in their propensity for aggressive behavior. Voxel- and surface-based morphometry (SBM) analyses were performed on 29 male martial artists and 32 age-matched male controls. Martial artists had significantly increased mean gray matter volume in two frontal (left superior frontal gyrus and bilateral anterior cingulate cortex) and one parietal (bilateral posterior cingulate gyrus and precuneus) brain clusters compared to controls (whole brain: p < 0.001, cluster level: family-wise error (FWE)-corrected). SBM analyses revealed a trend for greater gyrification indices in martial artists compared to controls in the left lateral orbital frontal cortex and the left pars orbitalis (whole brain: p < 0.001, cluster level: FWE-corrected). The results indicate brain structural differences between martial artists and controls in frontal and parietal brain areas critical for emotion processing/inhibition of emotions as well as empathic processes. The present study highlights the importance of studying healthy subjects with a propensity for aggressive behavior in future structural MRI research on aggression.
... We also found a significant negative correlation between the frequency of agitation/aggression and the left lateral occipital volume. Although aggressive behaviors have been linked to frontal cortex in subjects with overt behavioral diseases (Blair and Lee 2013), other studies on young drinkers have linked reduced gray matter in the occipital cortex to the generation of violent and antisocial behavior (Bertsch et al. 2013;Charpentier et al. 2016). Furthermore, reduced cortical thickness in the right pericalcarine cortex has been linked to the search for strong sensations and risky behaviors in healthy young adults (Holmes et al. 2016;Miglin et al. 2019). ...
Neuropsychiatric symptoms are intrinsic to Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP) and a spoonful of studies investigated their imaging correlates. Describe (I) the frequency and severity of neuropsychiatric symptoms in PSP and (II) their structural imaging correlates. Twenty-six PSP patients underwent Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI) and brain 3D T1-weighted MRI. Spearman’s rho with Bonferroni correction was used to investigate correlations between NPI scores and volumes of gray matter regions. More than 80% of patients presented at least one behavioral symptom of any severity. The most frequent and severe were depression/dysphoria, apathy, and irritability/lability. Significant relationships were found between the severity of irritability and right pars opercularis volume (p < 0.001) as well as between the frequency of agitation/aggression and left lateral occipital volume (p < 0.001). Depression, apathy, and irritability are the most common neuropsychiatric symptoms in PSP. Moreover, we found a relationship between specific positive symptoms as irritability and agitation/aggression and greater volume of the right pars opercularis cortex and lower volume of the left occipital cortex, respectively, which deserve further investigations.
... We also observed reduction of grey matter density in the occipital cortex. While this finding may be counterintuitive, given that this area is not thought to play a key role in emotional or social processing, group differences in this region have been reported (e.g., (Bertsch et al., 2013;Ly et al., 2012). Some authors (Boccardi et al., 2011) have interpreted this finding in the context of a hypoactivity of this area in response to emotional faces (Deeley et al., 2006) and impaired integration of bottom-up (sensory) and top-down (attentional) information (Newman 2007) in psychopathy. ...
Psychopathy is characterized by glibness and superficial charm, as well as a lack of empathy, guilt, and remorse, and is often accompanied by antisocial behavior. The cerebral bases of this syndrome have been mostly studied in violent subjects or those with a criminal history. However, the antisocial component of psychopathy is not central to its conceptualization and, in fact, psychopathic traits are present in well-adjusted, non-criminal individuals within the general population. Interestingly, certain psychopathy characteristics appear to be particularly pronounced in some groups or professions. Importantly, as these so-called adaptive or successful psychopaths do not show antisocial tendencies or have significant psychiatric comorbidities, they may represent an ideal population to study this trait. Here we investigated such a group, specifically elite female judo athletes, and compared them to matched non-athletes. Participants completed psychopathy, anger, perspective-taking and empathic concern questionnaires and underwent structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Grey matter density (GMD) was computed using voxel-based morphometry from the T1-weighted images. Athletes scored significantly higher in primary psychopathy and anger, and lower in empathy and perspective taking. They also exhibited smaller GMD in the right Temporal Pole, left Occipital Cortex, and left Amygdala/Hippocampus. GMD values for the latter cluster significantly correlated with primary psychopathy scores across both groups. These results confirm and extend previous findings to a little-studied population and provide support for the conceptualization of psychopathy as a dimensional personality trait which, not only is not necessarily associated with antisocial behavior, but may potentially have adaptive value.
... Lower gray matter volumes in the left cerebellum, specifically lobules I-IV, V and VIIB, and in right lobule VIIB have been observed in antisocial offenders compared to controls (Bertsch et al., 2013). Additionally, Puri et al. (2008) reported total cerebellar gray matter volume reductions in schizophrenic patients with a history of violent offenses as compared to nonviolent patients with schizophrenia. ...
According to the dual-route model of emotion, impulsive (affective) aggression involves fast acting limbic regions, whereas in instrumental (predatory) aggression the neural focus lies on top-down anterior cortical areas. However, increasing neuroscientific evidence now points toward differential involvement of the cerebellum in the aggression circuit. In particular, the medial cerebellum, the vermis, is suggested to be part of the limbic circuit involved in fast, preattentive processing during imminent threat and provocation, mediating impulsive forms of aggression. By contrast, the lateral cerebellar hemispheres with their connections to the motor and prefrontal cortex provide a substrate for the top-down regulatory control mechanisms that allow for premeditated and instrumental forms of aggression. This theoretical account can be reconciled with the involvement of the cerebellum in homeostatic functions and predictive coding. The available scientific evidence provides an empirical basis for the view that the cortico-limbic dual-route model of aggression should be extended to include the cerebellum.
... Our findings were consistent with these studies and support that violence in SZ is associated with morphological deficits in the right STG and its surrounding areas, which are involved in the processing of emotion-related information. Similar to these findings in vSZ, abnormal GMV was also prominent in violent offenders with psychopathy from forensic facilities (46,49,50). These results suggested a unique role of the STG in predisposing to violence in SZ by interfering with visual information processing and higher-order cognition related to emotional processing (51). ...
People with schizophrenia (SZ) are at increased risk of violence compared to the general population. However, the neural mechanisms of violent behavior in patients with SZ are still unclear due to the heterogeneity of the diseased population. In this study, we aimed to examine the neural correlates of violent behavior in SZ and to determine whether the structural deficits were related to psychopathic traits. A total of 113 participants, including 31 SZ patients with violent behavior (vSZ), 39 SZ patients without violent behavior (nvSZ), and 43 healthy controls (HC), completed the T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan and were analyzed using voxel-based morphometry approach. The psychopathic traits were assessed using the Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version (PCL:SV). The results showed decreased gray matter volume (GMV) in the vSZ group in the right temporal lobe and bilateral inferior frontal gyri compared to HCs; while reduced GMV in the inferior parietal lobe, parahippocampal and orbital frontal gyri was found in the nvSZ group compared with HCs. Correlation analyses showed that psychopathic traits were negatively associated with the GMV in the right superior temporal and left fusiform gyri in the vSZ group, indicating that psychopathic traits, as reflected by the score of antisocial factor, might be related to structural deficits in the temporal lobe, which led to a propensity to violent behavior in patients with SZ. Our findings suggest that violent behavior in patients with SZ might have a personality background associated with the frontotemporal network aberrance. In future studies, we need to take a closer look at psychopathic traits for better understanding of the mechanism of interpersonal violence in patients with SZ and to explore whether the imaging findings from this study can serve as a biomarker to predict future violent behaviors and community living.
... Additionally, structural voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and volumetry studies have provided evidence for structural cerebellar grey matter irregularities in the context of both impulsivity and aggression. In violent offenders, for example, several studies have found enhanced grey matter volumes in the right cerebellum and decreased volumes in the left cerebellum as compared to healthy controls [33][34][35][36][37]. By contrast, volume reductions of the right hemisphere [33] and total volume decreases of the cerebellum have been reported in violent offenders [38,39]. ...
... In violent offenders, for example, several studies have found enhanced grey matter volumes in the right cerebellum and decreased volumes in the left cerebellum as compared to healthy controls [33][34][35][36][37]. By contrast, volume reductions of the right hemisphere [33] and total volume decreases of the cerebellum have been reported in violent offenders [38,39]. In boys diagnosed with conduct disorder who are characterised by antisocial and impulsive behaviour, smaller grey matter volumes have been found in vermal regions [40,41] and several posterolateral lobules ( [42,43], but see [41] for findings showing local grey matter increases in posterolateral lobules). ...
... Higher physical aggression scores were found to be related to lower grey matter volumes of right posterior lobules VIIb and VIIIa. Our results concur with several studies in clinical populations that found evidence for reductions of right posterior lobules in psychiatric patients with aggressive symptoms including lobules VI [48], Crus I-II [42,44,46], VIIIb [33,43], and X [43]. However, higher grey matter volumes in the right posterior cerebellum have also been reported for criminal offenders as compared to controls [34,37]. ...
Several lines of evidence point towards the involvement of the cerebellum in reactive aggression. In addition to the posterior cerebellar hemisphere, the vermis has been suggested to play a prominent role in impulse regulation. In the present study, we set out to further examine the relationships between cerebellar grey matter volumes, aggression, and impulsivity in 201 healthy volunteers. 3 T structural magnetic resonance imaging scans were acquired to investigate grey matter volumes of the cerebellar vermis and the anterior and posterior lobules. Aggression was assessed with the Buss–Perry Aggression Questionnaire and impulsivity was measured with the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale-11. Results showed that impulsivity was positively associated with grey matter volumes of the cerebellar vermis and inversely correlated with grey matter volumes of the right posterior lobule. In addition, smaller volumes of the right posterior lobules were associated with higher physical aggression. Exploratory analyses indicated that for the right hemisphere, this association was driven by grey matter volumes of lobules VIIb and VIIIa. Our findings provide correlational evidence in healthy volunteers for the involvement of the cerebellar vermis and posterior lobules in a cortico-limbic-cerebellar circuit of aggression.
... Patients with conduct disorders have weaker functional connectivity within the bilateral middle occipital gyrus (Lu et al., , 2017. The gray matter volume of the bilateral occipital area was lower in psychopathic violent criminals than in normal individuals (Bertsch et al., 2013;Bogerts et al., 2018). Furthermore, activation of the occipital area was found to be related to moral judgment (Cheng et al., 2021). ...
... The NC value of CH12-CH36 (i.e., rFPC-rMO) was significantly lower during the MCT and BCT than during the AUT. We found that r-MO was less activated in the MCT (see details in Results: Differences between the beta increments for the different task conditions), which might be associated with immoral behaviors (Bertsch et al., 2013;Bogerts et al., 2018;Lu et al., 2020Lu et al., , 2017De Oliveirasouza et al., 2008). The frontopolar cortex is involved in generating creative solutions (Bendetowicz et al., 2017;Green et al., 2012;De Souza et al., 2014). ...
This study aimed to explore the neural correlates underlying idea generation during malevolent creativity (MC) using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Participants were asked to solve problems during three types of creativity tasks: malevolent creativity task (MCT), benevolent creativity task (BCT), and alternative uses task (AUT). fNIRS was used to record individual cerebral activity during the tasks. The results revealed that participants demonstrated weaker neural activation in the right middle occipital area (rMO) and lower neural coupling (NC) between the right frontopolar cortex (rFPC) and rMO during MCT than during BCT and AUT. These suggest that r-MO activity and NC between the rFPC and rMO may distinguish between malevolent and benevolent forms of creative ideation.
